A Comparative Research On Curriculum Systems Of Tourism Higher Education In China And Britain

Since China joined WTO and successfully organized a few big meaningful events, such as Beijing Olympic games and Shanghai World Expo, tourism in China has been increasingly important. As a result, talents in this area are needed badly, which means the quality of talents training has become the key of competition. Particularly, due to the fact that Tourism Management has been put into the category of first-level subject together with Business Management since 2012, higher demand for tourism higher education has been raised.However, although the higher education of tourism in China is developing very fast, it had a quite late start. In comparison with developed countries, Chinese tourism education is still far behind in terms of curriculum structures and training objectives. Being the leader of tourism higher education, UK’s curriculum structure and teaching approaches are worthy of learning from our tourism education.This dissertation tries to deeply discuss the existing problems lying in Chinese tourism higher education by comparing with UK’s tourism education system and recognizing the weakness of its own. By making our tourism education being more market oriented and internationalized and better combining education with vocation, this article tends to come up with recommendations of rebuilding Chinese tourism higher education.Here, the structure of this dissertation is outlined:The first part is defining some important concepts pertaining with tourism high education and curriculum system. Based on analyzing the background of the research and reading Chinese and international literature, I am trying to make a clear definition of higher education and tourism curriculum system, which hopefully can make a theoretical foundation of tourism higher education system.The second part is an all-sided and systematic analysis of tourism higher education between China and other counties. I selected a few typical universities and colleges to do a case study. During the comparison, it has been seen that there are quite many differences between China and UK in relation to the depth and width of tourism higher education courses.The third part is about the implications and recommendations of Chinese tourism higher education. We should keep our advantages in this area but at the same time we should also draw on UK’s advanced educational concept and curriculum systems. Moreover, we should aim at improving students’practical abilities and make the courses meet the needs of market and society.