Hospitality Students’ Acquisition of Knowledge and Skills through a Virtual Field Trip Experience

ABSTRACT

This study examines hospitality management students’ expectations and acquisition of knowledge and skills through the use of a Virtual Field Trip (VFT) platform. In total 135 students in Australia responded to pre- and post- open-ended questionnaires. The pre-questionnaire sought students’ expectations of knowledge and skill acquisition, whereas the post-questionnaire sought their perceptions of actual acquisition of knowledge and skill after engagement with the VFT. The empirical material was thematically analyzed using the textual analysis program Leximancer, facilitating an iterative process moving between codes and participants’ responses. Concept maps were generated thus visualizing thematic relationships. Findings reveal VFT provides a technology-enhanced solution to practice-based knowledge and employability skill acquisition that is successful in supporting assessment tasks and enhancing learning outcomes. Students also reported improvements in their knowledge about the functioning of hotels and an increase in their abilities to operationalize food and beverage systems after using the VFT. Hence, VFT can be an effective technological learning tool for the acquisition of knowledge and skills in hospitality and other fields.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual field trip
• skills
• knowledge
• experiential learning
• hospitality

Notes

1. All participant names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT), Department of Education and Training, Federal Government of Australia, [ID15-4905] (now recognized as Australian Government, Department of Education). The Innovation and Development Grant Program involved partnership between four higher education institutions and the hospitality industry at the international level to develop the VFTs and undertake research on students’ learning.