RE-ORIENTING CURRICULUM OF TOURISM EDUCATION IN THE CONTEXT OF COVID-19: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY

Authors : Venkata Rao YEDLA, E Joshu AJOON

Pages : 251-274

View : 32 | Download : 27

Publication Date : 2022-03-28

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :The tourism academic programmes transform a student into a tourism professional with a curriculum designed with classroom lecturing, field visits, and internship. These three components helps a student tounderstand the practices and approachesin the tourism sector. But, as the COVID-19 pandemic has escalated its impact on tourism academia and caused the curriculum to shrunk into online platforms, the classroom lecturing has shifted to virtual platforms such as google meet, zoom, cisco Webex, google classroom. The internship and the field visits were either cancelled or conducted in virtual mode. The situation has a significant effect on the tourism postgraduate students of the batch 2019-2021 as first half (2019-2020) of their course was conducted in regular mode and the second half ( 2020-2021) in virtual mode due to the pandemic. It seems a study on this batch will be crucial to explore the impacts of sudden change in pedagogy and assess the need to re-orient the curriculum. This article explores the scenario using qualitative inquiry into the viewpoints of tourism postgraduate students of the batch 2019-2021. Questionnaire was used to collect data and are analysed qualitatively. The findings of this study assist in assessing the need to re-orient the curriculum and understanding the areas which require modification to fit to the online pedagogy. As the perspectives of students are vital to design an efficient learning environment, the study will certainly complement to shape future of tourism education.
Keywords : Tourism Education, Postgraduate Students, COVID 19, E learning, Re orienting Curriculum