Travel and Tourism/Scope article

Running an Open Access Programme

"Kia ora and welcome to what we hope will be a challenging and exciting experience for you. The course will take you from the classroom into the real world of adventure tourism (in this case Wanaka) where you will gain the skills to research, develop and deliver an overnight adventure tour experience."

These are the opening sentences from the Otago Polytechnic, Diploma in Applied Travel and Tourism, Adventure Tourism course weblog. The blog not only welcomes students to the course but acts as an interface for the the library of resources being built on Wikieducator http://wikieducator.org/Travel_and_Tourism for the diploma programme. There are infact six weblogs operating on the two year diploma, each linked to a particular specialty.

For the past two years the programme has been in development, during this time it has remained fully operational and continued to maintain and attract further enrolements. This, I am sure, has been possible, due to the support of a hard working tourism team. Development of the wiki site will remain an ongoing project however one of the best features of Wikieducator is the ease in which you can change material, have resources added or edited.

There have been some important points we have identified and would like to share:

• the need for a nimble programme framework - to support student and industry needs, programmes must be continually evolving
• increased collaboration efforts both nationally and internationlly
• responsibility for self development, especially with social networking technology
• celebrating blended delivery - face to face and on-line learning components are both necessary