Download - School of Hotel & Tourism Management - The Hong ...

24Learning Experiencesthe Bahamas. Dr Koppel was the lead editor and amajor contributor to a monograph published by theAmerican Association of Higher Education entitledHospitality with a Heart: Concepts and Models forService-Learning in Lodging, Foodservice and Tourism.Clearly a pioneer in this discipline, the PolyU awarded athree year teaching grant in 2005 to further developservice-learning on campus. The grant has allowed DrKoppel to extend his stay. “The university can use thisvehicle to facilitate more interaction between theindustry and students,” he adds. Last year he engagedstudents and the Eaton Hotel in a joint initiative todeliver traditional moon cakes and chicken soup to theelderly as a service to the community.In the Fall of 2005, a group of Dr Koppel’s Year Onestudents worked with the JW Marriott Hotel to provideChristmas entertainment to patients at the Jockey ClubCheshire Home. “The experience taught students to beprofessional; they had to hold meetings with Marriottstaff beforehand, and coordinated what they wanted todo, organising the event from scratch by themselves,”he says. Students applied selected music as a culturalexpression in the entertainment they developed.Dr Koppel is confident that service-learning will becomemore pervasive: “this is developing into a very strongteaching trend right across the board; it can be appliedto all academic disciplines and is certainly not exclusiveto hospitality and tourism education.”Gaming Management Students VisitMacaoAssistant Professor Henry Tsai believes in action morethan words, so after weeks of teaching his GamingManagement course to a group of final yearundergraduates he decided they should experience theoperations of a casino for themselves. He took a groupof 48 students on a two-day trip to Macao in earlyNovember last year, arranging special visits to casinocomplexes including Sands Macao, Wynn Macao andStar World.“The casino managers took our group around Sandsand we even got a glimpse of the gaming areas usuallyreserved for VIPS,” says Dr Tsai. A casino executive fromLas Vegas also gave the students a comparative talk ongaming in Macao and the US.The gaming management students take a break in Macao“Some students had never been to a casino before,while others had not really paid special attention tothem, so the trip was a real eye-opener for many. Theygot an insight into casino operations, what dealers doand how games are played, and could really see howwhat they had learned could be applied to a real lifesituation,” he adds.US exchange student Kaitlin Haggard, a frequentvisitor to Las Vegas, comments that her original idea ofMacao was of “another island off China becomingWesternised by the popularity of gambling andcasinos.” But she returned optimistic that an amalgamof Eastern and Western influences would shape avibrant city.Aside from casinos, the group experienced aspects ofthe new Macao, visiting Fishermen’s Wharf and the A-Ma cultural village. They also encountered some of thetraffic congestion that has become symptomatic withintense development in the hospitality and tourismsector. Local student Stanley Leong sees the bright sideof this, speculating that the rapid development andlack of readily available talent will mean moreemployment opportunities for hospitality professionalsfrom Hong Kong.Dr Tsai’s course is the only SHTM undergraduate courserelated to gaming. It offers students an introduction tocasino gaming and provides an insight into the historyand operations of the industry in various parts of theworld. It also focuses on rules and regulations, gamingcontrol, gambling and technology surveillance, and thesocial and economic impact of gambling.HORIZONS