Tourism Capstone Project

Scope and Goals of the Program

A capstone course, also known as capstone unit or a senior thesis or senior seminar serves as the culminating and usually integrative experience of an educational program (e.g., “International Tourism”). It essentially serves the purpose of creating a specific problem-centric outcome to a specific (practical) task, in order to create a final integration of knowledge gained along the different course works and by this improve the employability after undergraduate and graduate studies.

Capstone projects are generally designed to encourage students to think critically, solve challenging problems, and develop skills such as oral communication, public speaking (in rare cases), research skills, media literacy, teamwork, planning, self-sufficiency, or goal setting—i.e., skills that will help prepare them for modern careers. In most cases, the projects are also interdisciplinary, in the sense that they require students to apply skills or investigate issues across many different subject areas or domains of knowledge.

Design, Scope and Goals of the Project

Students will work, coached by the Professor, in groups of 4-5 on a case/ a project.

This case will not stem directly from practice but will be designed by the Professor - close to reality and practice – depending and based on your personal needs. To identify those needs, we shall have a talk in class (at the end of the Tourism Service Management class) about issues which you would be interested in. Consequently, the case(s) will be presented to you before the course by means of briefings.

The scope and goal of the project is to practice and apply a multitude of methods on one or multiple integrated cases. Why “integrated”? Tourism essentially is a phenomenon with many different aspects; consequently, you will have to work in a multidisciplinary way, learning to work “on the big picture” as well on details.

In summary, it is not about “getting the one perfect solution to a problem” but to make use of theories, methods concepts you know for finding a solution or a set of alternative solutions that should be reasoned, logical, and clear.

Expected Learning Outcome

There shall be essentially three learning outcomes:

1. You will have a chance to increase your confidence to apply the learnings of a multiplicity of courses on a practical (and often pressing) case.
2. In addition, you will be able to explore different theories and methodologies by themselves (which will serve them well when it comes to their Master Thesis).
3. Moreover, you will learn to apply those different theories and methodologies to a specific case.

Deliverables

The deliverables in this course are as follows:

1. Professor: Teaching inputs along the course, individual coaching of groups, and continuous feedback on preliminary and final outcomes of the project work.
2. Students: Working on projects and presenting intermediate as well as final results in class.

Conditions of Compliance/ grading

The marking (grades given) will be based on a group presentations (outcomes) and the progress of the work along time. In addition, they will be weighted. Specifically,

• each intermediate presentation will be graded;
  each of these grades will be weighted with factor 1;
• each progress between presentations will be graded;
  each of these grades will be weighted with factor 1;
• the final presentation of the draft of the report will be graded;
  this grade will be weighted with factor 5;
• the final report (hand-in) will be graded and weighted with factor 5.

Possible topics

We will jointly explore possible topics in the last hours of the Tourism Service Management Class.