Its been a while

A photo from our recent fieldtrip to Queenstown and Fiordland. It was extemely cold on the two boats we had and great fun. One of our students is going back for work experience!

AJ Hackett's bungy jumping operation put on a tour for us and three students took the plunge.

Yes it has however I had done this post as draft in September but when I went back to it couldn't figure out how to post it. So I have rewritten it.

We have finished delivering tour guiding and are now working on assessment activities, marking guides and evidence and judgement statements to be sent to ATTTO (our training provider) for pre-moderation.

All of the activities for tour guiding have been designed by us andthis has been a substantial piece of work. The small amount of material which came with this programme when we purchased it was either incomplete or required further work to bring it to a level we felt happy delivering. There was also the problem with not being able to put any of the acquired material on the wiki. Whereas all our activities (OP) go on the wiki as resource for the blog.

We also realised the tour guiding outline within our programme document also needed to be changed to reflect our local area, industry and the unique flora, fauna and landscape we have in the South Island.

There changes along with three new course outlines will be going for academic approval as a category B change. The specialties: Reception Services, Tourism Enterprise and Adventure Tourism still require the development of teaching resources. Two of these will be completed by the end of the year and the third will be held over until 2008 and be developed along with two other specialties Conference and Events and Sustainable Tourism.

We have also been working to improve our content with regards to local iwi and treaty content. I have had successful discussions with Kate Timms and Willie Campbell and we will be looking to add content in year one and two of the diploma.

I hope to get the team to look at the core skills section at the end of the teaching year. This course requires some additions, editing and review before delivery in 2008. When it will be revamped to meet the requirements of ATTTO who have changed the national qualification linked to it and the unit standards that form it. This will be part of the curriculum development identified for 2008.

Update

The picuture below: http://flickr.com/photos/carreon/462155740/

"Dozens of tourists at one of the Cristo Redentor balconies. Many of them will open their arms as the Christ on the top of the mountain does, but this guy took a bit more risk standing on top of the handrail of the balcony. The Sugar Loaf and the Guanabara bay are in the background. Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. "

Developing new programmes can at times be like this.

The last two weeks have been busy ones not just for me but for the teaching team of Nicky and Kevin. This has included videoing some roleplays, carrying out some great map referencing work. Taking students on a guided tour of the university and getting students to comment on Kevin's leadership and guiding skills. They also went on a city tour (bus trip) much to the delight of the tour operator as according to him things have been pretty slow during the cold weather.

Activities using the internet have been placed on the course blog http://www.blogger.com/www.tourism1.wordpress.com and in an effort not to confuse students Nicky and Leigh made a democratic decision to post activities daily rather than weekly. A good decision (just as well I am not an autocratic leader) and not as time consuming as it sounds because you can post activities to the blog and let them sit there as drafts (unpublished) than its just a matter of publishing them. What is time consuming and I still don't think I have got it right, is putting the url address with the photo in the correct format. Will go back and look how its done in other activities.

The blog seems to have been a success with students and something they have had not problem in using. It has been useful for students who may have missed a session - they can catch up from home. We will have to remind students about referencing and there is of course the possibility that someone else could be doing the work.

Nicky has been doing a great job and has fitted into the team wonderfully. Kevin has been assisting Nicky with some of the equipment we use in the classroom eg. projector and overhead transperences and I think Nicky has been recipricating by explaining what is going on in the blog to Kevin. We will at some stage soon have a team session looking at the wiki and the blog. All of us had a look at the ICT activity Leigh designed and explained (at a very fast rate) in class. We got to have a look at google maps, and community work. Most students caught on really quickly, lecturers a little slower but I am mindful that there may be students who will be finding this quite challenging. Each activitity however has support material which often includes tutorials to assist with this.

The students at present are working at the Mellor Restaurant completing two unit standards. It may be good to change this for next year so that they are looking at doing food safety and first aid rather than the present units.

This coming week Nicky, Kevin and I will finish the development of the course and have designed a new assessment ready to go to ATTTO for premoderation. Lynn (another team member) has began an audit of the travel material for EIT. I have been in contact with TANZ to see what is required if we would like to put some of this material on the wiki. We really have enough of own material in travel to redevelop and use so this may not be an issue. We will also be using a newly designed electronic version of all the booking forms used by travel agents which is great, this has come from our association with TANZ.

Wiki, blog, blog, wiki, wiki, wiki, blog

Why the sign you may ask. Well its a bit like my working life at the moment. One way to this blog the other way to another blog and don't forget the wiki. At least I have a reasonable excuse for appearing confused and behind it all I have this aussie accented voice buzzing around in my head saying "update the blog, update the blog".

Actually its not that bad at all - as you will read. I will start at the end of my story and finish at the start - told you I was confused.

The Diploma in Applied Travel and Tourism has its own tourguiding wiki and course blog. The link to which you will find on the right.

Leigh, Nicky (who I will explain about soon) and I have been working intensley to have the blog up and running for students who started the new semester yesterday. They the students seem to really like it which is great and seem to be working from it easily. Just how common our students were with blogs however was suprising with 1 out of 20 saying they knew what one was.

Now its about upkeep, update and building on the resources and activities we have put together on the wiki. I got to utalise the advantages of a wiki when creating resources and activites for our one by downloading resources we can easily use from another. I have also created a generic "leadership styles" slideshow for general upload by other users of slideshare. I then used this as a basis for a tourism orientated one.

Nicky Snoyink is our new tour guiding lecturer and I am sure she must have wondered what she was getting into when she started teaching yesterday. Nicky comes from a background in tourism - as an operating tour guide (Managing Director) of her own company which runs guided walking tours in the lower south island for USA clients. This is the down season for such activities so the teaching position just worked out nicely.

We are running the specialty course four days a week - classroom sessions 8.30am - 10.30am and computing facilitation sessions 11am - 1pm. This is intermingled with activities of an applied nature eg. guided walk through university today - observing Kevin's (our other tour guiding lecturer) leadership skills and a one hour city sights bus tour tomorrow. All things which are vital to the practical understanding of the theory students learn.

Off to do some more development work but will be checking in before the end of the week again.

Plugging On

Things have been moving quickly on the development front - with the final section (Tour Guiding) of the programme core beginning this week with new resources in place and team members contributing to these with further resources - great. All work is being placed on a shared folder for easy access.

We are presently seeking a person with recent or present tour guiding experience to teach the tour guiding specialty (elective) which begins next semester. Looks as though there are some good candidates out there.

I am meeting with Dion Hyde from Hospitality tomorrow with the hope of future collaboration between our schools (Applied Business and Hospitality). More dedicated time will now be put to development with the hope that seven of the specialties will be completed by January 2008: tour guiding, travel operations, conference and events, adventure tourism, reception services, flight and cruise and tourism enterprises. This will leave tourism enterprises, wholesale travel, sustainable tourism for development in the first half of 2008 available in the second semester. Its going to be busy.

Wiki mania

Attended "what is a wiki" course earlier this week, run by Leigh (EDC) and Helen from the Learning Centre. Informative and enlightening - I think I finally get the idea of how things are to be set out for us.

The outline is above and I suppose for me it was actually seeing this in a visual form rather than looking at just the wiki development site(linked to this blog). In summary the only piece of the wiki students will see (unless they want to know the origin of resources, is the activity sheets. These are how students will apply the theory part of the programme and gain a fuller understanding of what they are doing. We will also make this blog available to run beside the activity sheets and use as another learning resource - in that whoever is teaching can provide extra resources and instructions through the blog. Assessment will be carried out separately.

I am also interested in looking at the introduction of Second Life (I am presently working through the tutorial which hopefully will tell me how to embed its URL as a link. http://secondlife.com/ Did it.

From next week on will be able to concentrate fully on the specialist subjects of the programme as am hoping to finish work on the core skills by Wednesday.

Have been working on the core of the diploma within the tour guiding taster section. Its really interesting as Karen (our tour guide from Queenstown) has provided some great information - so its been all about where to put it under the umbrella of unit standards. She has listed performance criteria eg. Unit 5678 PC 1.2 in some instances which is great but I have been trying to sort which of the information should be retained here in the core or go onto the specialist tour guiding area. Which is why I put this photo of containers at a Tunisia market on this posting.

I have decided (news for Leigh) I would like Leigh to provide the t&t team with a visual presentation of what we have been doing and where we are going, before the end of the semester. I don't think they are reading this blog and it is extremely difficult to get us all together for a regular meeting on development.

I will continue to work on the tour guiding core which has to be completed within two weeks - am starting to look at teaching resources and some lesson plans. The difficulty is finding a good stretch of uninterrupted time where you can really get into it.

Adventurous Development

A friendly yellow-eyed penguin at Taieri Mouth


Meet today with Leigh (EDU) and Andy Thompson (School of Adventure) to discuss working together to develop electives which would be of benefit to both tourism and adventure.

We discussed the term "Adventure Tourism" and its many definitions. From our point of view I felt it was more to do with providing students with a taster of what was available from tourism operators in NZ eg. mountain biking, kayaking, snow boarding, climbing. This could be combined with some theoretical eco tourism papers.

We also looked at an elective which students from the adventure school would find beneficial. This would probably centre around tourism management papers and be delivered 80% online with block tutorial sessions.

Overall a successful session and one which we will both be able to build on.

Progress

Yesterday two members of the travel and tourism team,(at out team meeting) Lynn and Sue bought up the possibility of creating an elective which would allow students to complete the external City & Guilds examination attached to our other programme (which we are no running next year). Their thinking behind this was that students would have the opportunity to gain an international qualification. This would be another point of difference for us from other providers and definetly should be looked into. Which we will do.

Leigh, Karen and I are having a skypecast today to discuss our progress.

Wikieducator

Refer to the wikieducator link to the tour guiding page and below are the five unit standard titles we have included for ease of maintenance and updating, collaboration with other institutions and international networking and Leigh's contribution is to add free and open learning for developing countries.

How visitors learn from interpretation, and evaluate interpretive techniques
Prepare and implement an interpretation plan for tourist attractions, activities and events
Manage health and safety in a tourism context
Demonstrate leadership skills in a tour context
Knowledge of visitor interpretation
Retrieved from "http://wikieducator.org/Tour_Guiding"

New Developer

I am really excited about taking on a new developer to help with the tour guiding elective in DATT.

Karen Jackson who is presently working as a tour guide in Queenstown has agreed to do some work for us. Just to be able to tap into her past and present practical experience is great. Welcome Karen!

Leigh and I have met with Karen at the polytech and plan to go to Queenstown overnight in the first week of May as a follow up.

New blog

We have created a new blog and I will migrate all of the information from our previous blog.

Strategic Direction of Travel and Tourism 2007 onwards

Strategic Direction of Travel and Tourism 2007 onwards

At present the School of Applied Business offers to undergraduate programmes in travel and tourism:
· Diploma in Applied Travel and Tourism (Level 5)
· Diploma in International Tourism (Level 5)

In looking at the strategic direction of travel and tourism it was felt that the applied diploma would provide a more comprehensive platform from which to develop new and innovative electives which would assist the programme and school in continuing to deliver a programme which meets the future needs of the industry.

Introduction
The Diploma of International Tourism (DIT) gained project funding of $36,838.00 in 2006 to upgrade its teaching materials and flexible delivery methods. To date $17,142.00 of this has been spent on hardware, staff release time, and a designer.

It is the intention of the project team (John West, Hillary Jenkins, Leigh Blackall) to:
· redirect the remaining funds from the DIT project to the newly acquired Diploma in Applied Travel and Tourism (DATT)
· to concentrate on the full and further development of DATT
· to discontinue the Diploma in International Tourism from the end of 2007
· to provide a better integration/advancement of tourism areas between diploma and degree levels in the school

Discussion on the above points has been held beyond the project team with Group Leader, Chris Morland, the Deputy CEO Robin Day and travel and tourism team members.

The following plan has been resolved:
1. The Blackboard shell that has been set up for DITT will become a "shared drive" for the teachers engaged in the face to face teaching. In it will go all the resources that are used to teach DITT. Students will not have access to this shell, it will be used by staff to practice using Blackboard in preparation for development of DATT.

2. As resources are loaded into the DITT shell, anything that can be made relevant for DATT will be identified. Staff will work towards improving the identified resources and making them ready for reformatting by the designer. This role will be undertaken by two staff members currently under project funding and will be finished by June 2007.

3. A new Programme Development Application will be made for funding the development of DATT once it is known how much more money and resources will be needed after spending the remainder of the DITT budget.

4. Development will include – Further development of the Hub. While it is being taught at present, this will have to be realigned as the training provider (ATTTO) has outlined changes to be made in the core skills area (covering this area).

5. Developing resources for the first two existing course outlines (ready for semester 2). Developing two further existing electives (course outline done) and two new electives (course outlines need to be created) plus the research project for teaching in 2008. It is estimated this project would take until June 30, 2008. (Do you think this is long enough – June maybe)

6. A DATT blackboard shell will be created for use in 2008 by students and staff.

7. The Programme Manager will head the project development and arrangements have been made so that most of her teaching duties are covered. That development time will be used to consult with EDC services to further develop the flexible learning curriculum of DATT. Any outside expertise required will be paid from the project budget.

8. A resource audit will be conducted for DATT, using library services to assist in finding reusable learning resources that are in line with the flexible elearning curriculum design devised for DATT.

9. Based on what curriculum activities are devised for DATT and what reusable resources are found, the remainder of the new DATT Development budget will be spent both on staff and resource development



Hillary Jenkins’
Programme Manager
Travel & Tourism
School of Applied Business

Day 2

We were joined by Wendy Ritson-Jones from the library. Today we reviewed what we have done or not done so far.We discussed the use of Wikiversity and some of the consequences of opening up the content of the programmes. We have had some interest in the polytechnic from students from Brazil who wish to join our programmes and gain work experience here. This was an amazing outcome which we are not yet prepared for but wish to be.We then posted some more material for First Line Management on to wikiversity.We don't actually know yet if we can copy this in this way as it is a TANZ resource - we are awaiting a response from TANZ. In the meantime we are putting content outlines - not the actual content