Hospitality Curriculum

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revision, learning outcomes, the assessment of this outcome heavily relies on how well it fits into the culture in which it was created. Rutz (2010) emphasized that conflict between the institutions learning outcomes is likely to generate disastrous results for the department and students. There can be several factors accountable for the increasing emphasis on the service industry such as technology enhancements, customers diverse needs, more choices available for customers, and the skyrocketing competition amongst companies. Consequently, it has become more challenging to keep up with the changing patterns of consumers’ needs and expectations (Baum, 2005). As one of the core segments of the service industry, the hospitality sector has experienced …show more content…

Lowry and Flohr (2005) describe the hospitality sector to be service oriented resulting in most hospitality programs putting more weight on industry expectations and opinions, as opposed to the providers’ and students’ preferences. Swanger & Gursay (2007) supports this statement and continues by mentioning that this results in most of the relevant hospitality curriculum studies being overly focused on the employer’s perspective, with very few focusing on the actual providers and recipients of the education. Often employers (industry practitioners) lack the adequate knowledge to rationally assess hospitality curricula (Cappel & Kamens, 2007). Students and faculty members, on the other hand, are able to rationally assess the hospitality programs with regards to how well they contribute to students’ preparedness for their anticipated future hospitality careers (Swanger & Gursay, …show more content…

Lowry and Flohr (2005) state that students, on the other hand, are best able to judge their own level of preparedness as they are the ones who are going through the process of learning, which is part of the curriculum. Faculty members are therefore only able to judge certain generic and fundamental skills of the students and definitely not the specific skills and their appropriateness in career preparedness as taught in the curriculum. Thus, curriculum evaluation in hospitality education should involve both the perspectives of the students, and the knowledge of the providers, who are experts in both industry and academics (Swanger & Gursay,

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