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Facilitating global learning through international educational tourism: A closer look at university summer courses

Tran, Nguyen Diem My
Moore, Kevin
Date
2019-12
Type
Conference Contribution - published
Fields of Research
Abstract
The opportunity to link leisure with education is often an attractive option to many people, especially on the international scale for its perceived efficient use of travel time and cost. Despite being a growing trend, the area of international educational tourism has not been well studied. It is also often discussed interchangeably with, or even subsumed within, international education. The area of international educational tourism is full of potential but under studied (McGladdery& Lubbe, 2017a; McGladdery& Lubbe, 2017b). This paper examines the impacts of short international summer courses on students as well as on the study destination. The paper draws on findings from relevant literature, and personal experience from a two-week summer course in Tour Guiding at The University of Pannonia (Hungary) by the first author. Daily journals of class activities and personal observation during the two-week period were kept, then analysed and interpreted for meanings that help inform the argument. The results show that, for students, short international summer courses facilitates global learning through a combination of emotional, intellectual and social learning opportunities. Accordingly, they can make a considerable contribution to the students’ personal development. This finding reconfirms the educational value of short-term study abroad programmes by Ritz (2011). For the study destination, short summer courses can be considered a sustainable educational tourism product. They present an effective way of linking tourism and education, putting academic training in a vacation context that would likely be less stressful than with other, more conventional, long-term studies. Moreover, international education tourism inspires learners towards becoming more socially and environmentally responsible (McGladdery& Lubbe, 2017a). Travel experiences of students who attend the international summer coursemay benefit from their initial cultural and social exposure to the destination during their study. In such cases, culture shock and social conflicts may be less likely to happen and, hence, a better overall tourism experience can be achieved. In general, short summer courses have great potential to grow with numerous positive impacts on both the students and the study destination. The paper calls for more studies that conceptualise international educational tourism and explore the impacts of various products on students, education providers and destinations.
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