Recently, “International Culture and Tourism Development”, the first Micro-Bachelor project for tourism subject, was launched by NKU’s College of Tourism and Service Management. “More than twenty colleges and universities expressed their willingness to cooperate”, said Qiu Hanqin, Dean of the College of Tourism and Service Management, “our vision is to make high-quality education resources to be universal and easy-to-get.”
With the advancement of Internet and universal use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, traditional teaching & learning has been transferred from physical space to virtual environment. Educational Informatization 2.0 Action Plan was promulgated by the Ministry of Education a few days ago, calling for advancing “Internet + Education” for deeply integrating IT and education & teaching.
The International Culture and Tourism Development consists of International Tourism Development Dynamics, Tourism Planning, Culture and Tourism, and Introduction to Tourism. Students who complete the online course of 1 curriculum will be granted the credit certificate for that course; after completing four courses with credits, the students will be granted the Micro-Bachelor Course Certificate.
This project was inspired by the experience of Qiu Hanqin—it was about the period that she was teaching in The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HKPU). By the end of 2015, Qiu Hanqin hosted the building of “Micro-Master” project. It took them 18 months from course R&D to online operation. More than 40,000 people have been attracted to study online in just one year after launching, and more than 600 students paid and verified the “Micro- Master” Certificate, which inspired Qiu Hanqin a lot. More than that, “Micro-Master” project was supported and encouraged by practitioners from both hotel and tourism industries, believing that the “entry-level” online course was more wanted by the industry.
In April 2018, Qiu Hanqin joined NKU in the capacity of Dean of the College of Tourism and Service Management. Since then, she began to plan how to synchronize the excellent courses of NKU online, and integrate the high-quality education resources like “strands of a rope”. Not only that, online courses should provide richer contents and diversified learning experience.
Qiu Hanqin’s ideas have been supported by NKU. The Teaching Affairs Office, International Exchange Office, the College of Tourism and Service Management, Remote College, Business School, the School of Physics, and School of Economics and other departments participated in the demonstration pertaining to the Micro-Bachelor project of the College of Tourism and Service Management. Li Chuanyong, Head of Teaching Affairs Office, presented that “Micro-Bachelor” project of the College was a pilot project for Nankai University to advance online course building and create online gold courses, based on which the construction of MOOC 2.0 was furthered. “How can we ensure that the quality of online courses is as good as the face-to-face courses? We must fully consider course design, operation and evaluation. This pilot lays a solid foundation for us to create gold course aggregation by summing up experience and discovering problems”, said Li Chuanyong.
The “International Culture and Tourism Development” launched this time consists of 32 credit hours, of which includes 20 credit hours of online learning and 12 credit hours of face-to-face teaching (live). All courses will be taught in English with Chinese captions. With extensive services of the course, not only can Chinese students use it, but foreign students can also attend classes smoothly. Taking Pakistan as an example, the lesson one introduces the impact of tourism on the countries along the “Belt and Road Initiative”. “We hope that the Micro-Bachelor course in English will serve countries along the “Belt and Road Initiative”, so that more learners can understand China better”, said Qiu Hanqin.
