Author(s): Tülay POLAT ÜZÜMCÜ Ömür ALYAKUT
Theoretical and practical sufficiency of the labour force is one of the most important elements of service quality offered in the tourism sector. Therefore, educational institutions have a significant role in acquiring both academic achievement and preparation for business life. The main objective of tourism education institutions is to contribute the development of the tourism sector by giving basic education as well as tourism awareness and philosophy, to the staff who will work in the tourism sector and thus to provide skilled personnel in the tourism sector. Tourism education is developing in Turkey and researches are continuing in order to enhance tourism training in secondary education and higher education in a manner that can well respond to the needs of the tourism sector. In this context, when studies related to tourism education are examined it is seen that the researches on tourism education are approached from three perspectives, namely, student viewpoint, tourism sector viewpoint and perspective of tourism educators. In addition, it is seen that most of the researches in this field focus on the student's perspective, followed by research on the tourism sector, and tourism academicians is the least searched dimension. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the opinions of tourism academicians at university level in Turkey. The data of the study is collected by structured interview technique. In the study, objective sampling is used to obtain the views of the educator from each academic level. Content analysis which is one of the qualitative analysis techniques is used in the analysis of the data. The structured interviews are transformed into transcripts, descriptive analysis was applied to the transcripts to determine the categories and then the results are presented and interpreted. Consequently, suggestions were made for the development of tourism education in line with the opinions of tourism academicians related to tourism education.
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