The program aimed to teach students not only the fundamentals of the Australian Tourism Product, but also generic skills in areas of written and oral communications, logical and analytical thinking, research, and teamwork. Students worked in groups and developed a tourism marketing or development project for their allocated state. Funding documents were prepared instead of traditional academic reports, and each group made an oral presentation of their funding bid to the rest of the class. The program aimed to teach students not only the fundamentals of the Australian Tourism Product, but also generic skills in areas of written and oral communications, logical and analytical thinking, research, and teamwork.
Tourism is a dynamic and industry based specialism, global in nature and real world oriented.
This area of study often crosses over numerous subject areas, and even departments, within the university structure. Another important consideration in the design of tourism curricula, is the need of tourism educators to recognise the short term employment needs of industry and match these with graduate outcomes. The nature of tourism therefore lends itself to, and some would say requires, innovative, flexible and creative methods of curricula delivery. To facilitate active learning and explain the interdisciplinary nature of tourism, case studies and practical exercises have proven to be effective tools for drawing together individual threads of a subject or topic. To be effective though, much planning must be undertaken in the design and implementation of the case study method.