Search

COVID-19 has significantly disrupted global landscapes and forced a quick adaptation towards new ways of conducting higher education, with almost all tertiary institutions compelled to embrace online teaching and learning quickly. In addition, this crisis presents an opportune moment to reflect on the why and how higher education assessments should be framed through a blue ocean strategy for disciplines such as tourism and hospitality. While the blue ocean strategy has emerged within tourism and hospitality practice, little is known as to how this is manifested in the context of educational settings, and especially academic voices as part of such radical transformations following COVID-19. To address this gap in knowledge, this research traces the journeys of 16 Chinese academics transitioning as educators before, during, and after the outbreak of COVID-19 through the theory’s four actions framework of eliminate, reduce, create, and raise. The findings revealed how the pandemic challenged their philosophical stances of who we are as assessors, the dilemmas of technology-mediated learning and assessment, indicators of professional development, and assessing outside one’s comfort zone. Derived from these outcomes is a conceptual framework around a blue ocean strategy to repurpose the role of assessments from a narrative of what and how, to what now and how else of tourism and hospitality education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the reader to an experiment that proposes an expanded format of cooperative learning techniques with sets of pedagogical innovations to better meet the teaching outcomes. In this context the paper presents a decision-making game where Tourism and Hospitality students are fully involved in the educational process via active participation in the Tourism and Travel Game. The game demonstrates decision-making processes that must be taken within competitive environment with imperfect information. The individual components of the game allow players to explore the effects of production capacity, production costs, market demand, and government controls within a competitive market. Students are expected to develop various skills and competences during game. The paper presents an assessment instrument in order to provide a feedback if students benefited from opportunities that replaced a lecture with active participation by using the Tourism and Travel Game. An assessment instrument allowed us to evaluate the students' opinion on their knowledge acquisition and retention rate. Each student was given the same questionnaire that evaluated how teaching with Tourism Game had influenced each area of the students' learning outcome: positive interdependence, face-to-face interaction, individual accountability, group processing of the group learning experience, critical thinking, problem solving, decision-making ability, aptitude for detail, oral communication, written communication, knowledge of information, ability to organize and analyze, comprehension, application, synthesis and evaluation. Obtained results indicate a strong support for using the game as a pedagogical tool rather than a traditional lecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]