Maquinaria Empleada

Despite the fact that tourism is one of the most popular elective in South African high school, there is limited academic research on tourism education in South African high schools. According to Chili (2013:34), there is a “total disquiet with a particular literature in South African tourism education in schools. […] it’s so scarce that it’s an area for concern […]”

Furthermore, coupled with the widespread impact of the South African tourism industry, information and communication technology (ICT) has rapidly penetrated public and

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private sectors of the country. Yet, the many uses and implications of ICT for tourism education in South Africa are unclear and under-theorised as a research area (Adukaite, Van Zyl, & Cantoni, 2016). Currently there are no studies on ICT usage for tourism education in South African high schools.

The literature review of previous gamification studies in educational settings provided an overview of the use of different game mechanics. However, majority of the gamification studies are conducted in the higher education institutions specifically with information technology and computer science students. Studies in different application fields such as high school environment of after curriculum activities related to other disciplines such as mathematics, science etc. are emerging but are still quite at infancy stage. The researcher was not able to identify a study of gamification in tourism education area. Moreover, looking at the geographical area where gamification studies were conducted, North America and Europe are the most common settings and rarely developing and emerging countries. Only two out of investigated 15 studies were in Asia (Hew et al., 2016; Su & Cheng, 2014), one on Brazil (daRocha Seixas et al., 2016) and one in South Africa (O’Donovan et al., 2013).

This study aims to make contribution in this respect: firstly, investigating the extent to which ICT supports tourism education in South African high schools. Secondly, examination of gamified learning acceptance within education in developing country context i.e. South Africa, specifically within the tourism subject contents of the secondary education level.

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Overall aim

To examine the role of ICT and gamified learning within tourism education in South African High Schools.

Research objectives

RO1. To determine the extent ICT supports tourism education.

RO2. To identify the barriers for ICT integration in tourism education.

RO3. To assess students’ user experience in terms of engagement with gamified application.

RO3. To identify factors that influence tourism teachers’ behavioural intention to accept gamified learning application.

Research design

 In-depth semi-structured interviews (n=24), 30-75’

 Tourism teachers (n=19) and government officials (n=5)  Non-randomized sampling  2 districts, schools ranging from

urban to township

 Inductive thematic coding NVivo10  Intercoder reliability test on 30% of transcript sample, 83% agreement

 213 tourism students (grades 11-12) played WHACY, 30-45’

 9 focus groups (75 students: 5-10 per gr.)

 Non-randomized sampling  2 districts, schools ranging from

urban to township

 Thematic coding NVivo 10

 Online Questionnaire (n=209)

 In-service tourism teachers  Non randomized sampling  3 provinces

 Tested WHACY, exemplary version aligned to tourism curriculum

 Descriptive statistics (SPSS); SEM (lavaan: An R package)

Informing theoretical framework

Technology Domestication (Habib, 2005);

Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura, 1977)

Theory of Intrinsically Motivating Instruction (Malone, 1981);

Flow Theory (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990)

Technology acceptance and integration; 7 constructs

Main findings

 ICT is recognised as essential especially in poorly resourced schools for providing exposure to the tourism industry.

 ICT integration is still limited.  Major obstacles: teachers’

technology anxiety due to lack of training, availability of technical resources, resistance on the side of learners to use their mobile phones, both for economic reasons (cost of data transfer), as well as for lack of skills.

 The most engaging gamification features: competition (through the scoring system), immediacy of feedback, visual aesthetics and challenge.

 Gamified application triggered curiosity and willingness to learn more about the related topics.  Insights into affordances of

gamification to facilitate engagement and potential knowledge enhancement.

 Perceived application’s

playfulness, curriculum relatedness, and self-efficacy were identified as having direct impact of behavioural intention.

 Teachers’ technology training

strongly correlated with levels of behavioural intention to adopt gamified learning.

78 This PhD thesis resulted in 4 publications:

 Adukaite A., Van Zyl I., Cantoni L. The Role of Digital Technology in

Tourism Education: A Case Study of South African Secondary Schools.

Journal of Hospitality, Leisure, Sports and Tourism Education (JoHLSTE). Status: Accepted.

 Adukaite A., Van Zyl I., Cantoni L. (2016). The Role of ICT in Tourism Education: A Case Study of South African Secondary Schools. eReview of Tourism Research (eRTR). ENTER 2016 Conference of Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism: Volume 7 Research Notes. Access online:

http://ertr.tamu.edu/files/2016/01/ENTER2016_submission_123.pdf  Adukaite, A., Cantoni, L. (2016). Raising Awareness and Promoting Informal

Learning on World Heritage in Southern Africa. The Case of WHACY, a Gamified ICT-enhanced Tool. International Journal of Education and Development using

Information and Communication Technology (IJEDICT), 12(2).

 Adukaite A., Er Ş., Van Zyl I., Cantoni L. Teacher perceptions on the use of digital gamified learning in tourism education: The case of South African secondary schools. Computers and Education.

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Publication 1: The Role of Digital Technology in Tourism