Description

The core of the pilot project was the trial run of the Freshman Seminar in Semester 1 of the Academic Year 2011/12. This was in the light that successful trial run would serve as the prototype for the actual launch of the Freshman Seminar in 2012/13. In order to prepare for the trial run in September 2011, both qualitative and quantitative research methods were used to collect data concerning students' learning neeeds from different stakeholderes' perspectives including teachers and students. Qualitative interviews were conducted with current SHTM faculty members, secondary school career  masters, Form 5 students, as well as then then SHTM Year One students before the development of the syllabus for the trial run. During the trail run, mid-term evaluation, which was a customary practice of SHTM, was collected qualitatively on the students taking the Freshman Seminar class. Upon the completion of the Freshman Seminar class in December 2011, post-class studies, both quantative and qualitative, were conducted to collect students' opinions about and experiences in the class. A post-class questionnaire survey was administered to the students to collect their comprehensive views on the Freshman Seminar subject, and at the end a number of 103 students completed the questionnaires. Apart from that, four focus group interviews with a total of 17 students were conducted to explore more in-depth opinions about their learning experiences of Freshman Seminar and seek their suggestions for improvement. These 17 students were selected based on purposive sampling on all students who have taken the Freshman Seminar subject. In addition to the project team's analysis of all quantitative and qualitative data, the project team worked with EDC on analysinng parts of the quantative dataset. Advice was soought from EDC on utilising e-Learning platform for course delivery.

Remarks

The trial run in 2011 was an important experiene for the project team and subject team. The collected data from both qualitative and quantitative methods were very useful to fine-tune the content of the syllabus and teaching material. The major change that the project team embarked on was the change in the teaching hour matrix from 2-hour mass lecture and 1-hour tutorial to 1.5-hour mass lecture and the 1.5-hour tutorial. This was a big change because it means more interactive exercise had to be developed and incorporated into the comprehensive and coherent series of tutorials. Selecting and creating interactive exercises were another challenge. With the operation and effort made by the team, all tutorials had been developed professionally with props and materials prepared in the interactive tutorials. The team's persistence on this change served as an example of the importance of valuing and listening to students' opinions.

Difficulties Encountered

Coordination of all stakeholders' needs

Develoing a syllabus for Freshman Seminar was challening as we had to take into consideration different stakeholders' needs - students' self-evaluated learning needs, as well as their learning needs from faculty members' and secondary school career masters' perspectives. Freshman Seminar aims at socialising the students in order to facilitate a smooth transition to the university life and groom them for preparing for the future challenges in their career.  On the other hand, taking into consideration the importance of learning applied knowledge, Freshman Seminar has to be developed using a discipline-based framework. In other words, it could not be too generic but be developed on a discipline-specific framework for hospitality and tourism management.  One example of the challenges is the lack of discipline-specific textbook tailor-made for the freshmen studying the hospitalit and tourism management programme. Therefore, a lot of effort was required to strike a balance between generic knowledge and discipline-specific knowledge.

Overlapping of some topics with other introductory subjects such as Introduction to Hotel Operations

Given the subject content must be relevant to the discipline-specific knowledge, it was expected to incorporate introductory knowledge about the hospitality and tourism industry into the syllabus. Some students might find the material slightly overlapping with other introductory subjects. However, this was inevitable due to the nature of the discipline-specific Freshman Seminar.  Discipline-based Freshman Seminar aims to socialise students not only with the generic knowledge of coping with the transitioni to the university life but also with the discipline-specific knowledge in order to increase their passion for the discipline and industry and to pave the way for students of both hotel and tourism streams to gradually progress to senior years of their study. In light of this, the project team approached EDC for consultation and advice. By using the "spiral" concept to explain to students they would learn the fundamental knowledge via the Freshman Seminar and then learn more advanced knowledge in the following years by progressively increading the level of difficulties and in-depth analysis of similar/ overalapping topics.