Meeting Your Own Deadlines: Introducing Flexibility into Student Assessment

ABSTRACT This paper will report on the development, implementation, and evaluation of an innovative teaching approach used in a tourism policy and planning class that offered students options to design their own assessment schedule based on a tourism planning simulation. This flexible, student-directed, problem-based approach allowed students to tailor an individual learning program and required them to act as if they were presenting completed documents for a tourism planning group. The evaluation used both class administration data, student performance data and the results of surveys of students to assess a range of indicators including student support for the system, outcomes in terms of enhanced student performance, and the costs of the innovation in terms of class administration time and resources. Overall the results supported the use of the innovation, and the evaluation provided some directions for improved design.

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