In this week all of us as one big group attended a bachelor thesis
presentation in the campus of Haaga tourism college. The student who we
attended her presentation was from china and her thesis was about applying the Santa
idea in China. She represented her study very well and our group showered her
with a lot of questions. It was the first time for me to know that Santa was
born in Finland.
There were two visits to the kitchen and the hotel rooms in the campus.
I liked most the hotel rooms we have visited. They were very modern and nice. I
am not a business expert, but I think the rooms are very costly and I don’t
know how such a hotel would benefit out of them. As we have been informed that
one room costs about 500 thousands Euros which is a cost of a complete hotel in
some places back home.
In general I have enjoyed the trip. Again I have learned new things
about teaching and its effect on real life. It was a good trip for me since my
city back home one of the cities that have tourism colleges. If I have chance
when I go back I will try to express and implement my observations.
About the expensive hotel rooms:
ReplyDeletethe thing to learn from that was that schools can cooperate with private companies, venture capitalists and government agencies to get funding for research and development projects. The students studied trends and came up with ideas for future hotels. They then (together with faculty) raised money to implement the project. Only some ideas are viable in real tourism business. Others are just basic research on e.g. how much time could be saved in cleaning if nano-coating was used. So, the two rooms are a research lab, and they are not expected to make profit.
I think the hosts had put up a solid program around final work presentation and the whole process. As we heard, it's possible to make either a research paper or a developmental project as one's final work. The latter is a new approach in Universities of Applied Sciences, where the aim is to find also new practical solutions for the field, not only do literature-based research with limited empirical benefits. What type of final projects do your students do? Is plagiarism an issue in Saudi Arabia? What measures do you take to get rid of it?
- Irmeli
In my department which is the Computer Science, most students work in groups to either write and do a program using one of the computer programming language such as C++, or they write a report about a specific subject related to computer science.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, plagiarism is an issue in general but it is not that big one. Some teachers back home instead of reporting cheating incidents, they either accept them as they are or give another chance to students to repeat their reports. In some cases some teachers don’t' even read such reports and just give a grade for submitting them. It is not a big issue but I think we should teach students how to write reports first and then ask them to write some because some students think of reports as gathering information without making any alteration or rewrite them again in their own words. So I believe that students should take an academic writing course before they get to the stage where they have to write reports.
In Finland it's often the Finnish teacher, who teaches the proper way of referencing. Of course also the teacher in charge of guidance and counseling of the final work talks about the proper way of documenting the final work. I have never used Urkund myself, but I guess it really has become an important tool against plagiarism in bachelor and even masters level. My students are teachers and their developmental projects are most of the time very personal: how can I develop my own work. In those papers plagiarism is not an issue :)
ReplyDelete- Irmeli