Designing the Four-Year Tourism Management Curriculum: A Marketing Approach

Abstract

The literature indicated that most four-year tourism management programs in the United States were designed by educators with very little or no empirical input from the industry. As such, the undergraduate tourism curriculum lacks standardization and relevance to the needs of the industry. Like any entity in a market-driven economy, departments offering four-year tourism management education must base their offerings on a marketing approach instead of a selling approach if they want to remain sustainable. Accordingly, a two-stage study was undertaken to determine necessary elements in the undergraduate tourism management curriculum. The results indicated that the curriculum should comprise four educational clusters; 15 subjects were judged as very important.

Research Paradigms and the Tourism Curriculum

“…It does this by way of a critique of recent proposals for the curriculum in the literature of tourism higher education. These are the Koh (1995) study and the National Liaison Group for Higher Education in Tourism (NLG) proposals (Holloway, 1995). Koh's marketing approach was to survey industrialists and academics as a basis for design of the tourism curriculum and the more recent World Tourism Organisation / Bournemouth University study (Shepherd, 1997) deploys a similar method.…”

Tourism Studies in the Higher Education in Sweden: Focusing on Sustainability

“…The issues of tourism curricula design existed from the moment tourism became an independent area of study. The development of the first tourism curricula in higher education had vocational origins (Koh, 1995, Holloway, 1995Tribe, 2005). In Sweden, the first curricula developed "as a mix of traditional academic knowledge and practical skills to meet demands of tourism industry representatives to make the students employable" (Steen, 2012: p. 149).…”

Tourism Curriculum in a Global Perspective: Past, Present, and Future

“…If this focus was not the case, curricula moved towards business emphasis (Koh, 1995;Gunn, 1998). The study of Koh (1995) covers 150 tourism educators and 18 national organizations in the United States. The study reveals the common elements desired in an undergraduate tourism management degree.…”

“…A similar phenomenon occurred in the US. Koh (1995) mentioned that rather than leaving the task of curriculum development to educators, involvement of the tourism industry in curriculum development process was needed. Middleton and Ladkin (1996) further determined that, if tourism is only allowed to mean what academics want it to mean, then two gaps might arise.…”

“…However, these subjects "avoided philosophical issues of alternative ends of tourism education...lack of articulation of ethical elements of tourism or the accommodation of disciplinary, critical or non-business approaches to the field" because the NLG results were conducted based on a scientific positivist paradigm. Tribe also further refers to the proposed curriculum by Koh (1995), whose curriculum design and input was sought to fulfill the needs of the industry. Tribe (2005, p. 54) comments that the "...Koh curriculum included ethics and social responsibility but, like the NLG core it is still essentially dominated by vocationalist thinking-a curriculum for the industry with a quite narrow view of tourism."…”