Good digital skills and experience in web browsing and searching.

Basics of Tourism management and place branding.

The previous attendance of the ITourDem courses "Place Branding and Rural Development" and "Tourism and Heritage Management" is not mandatory but strongly recommended.

Upon completion of this laboratory, students will be able to:

- Reflect critically on the impact of digital technologies on Tourism, inside the perspective of a co-creative and collaborative framework, including customers reviews

- Critically discuss the factors affecting organizational changes (and resistance to changes) in a quality framework

- Discuss co-creative and collaborative eTourism concepts, definitions and principles

- Evaluate an eTourism program, considering its requirements, opportunities, returns and risks

- Contribute to the editing of collaborative digital resources

- Demonstrate good analysis and communication skills.

Laboratory topics:

1. A quality framework for digital resources: theory, requirements, development, sustainability, with a focus on the methods for evaluating a tourism digital service;

2. Digital channels for DMOs;

3. The voice of tourists: quality and use of reviews

4. Collaborative Web & Tourism: the Wikimedia ecosystem.

The instructor will propose reading resources to support the presentation of learning topics. The study of these resources is not mandatory but recommended.

A general source to start from could be: Z. Andreopoulou et al. Tourism and new media, Franco Angeli, 2016 (chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 14), total pp. 70.

• The laboratory will have a seminar format with presentations of each topic (with national and international case studies) by the instructor, with the following discussion.

  In-class hands-on activities, individual and group assignments, seminars and field trips with key informants will be essential for the laboratory. The instructor will consider whether the students played an active part in discussions and hands-on activities.

• To obtain a positive evaluation, students have to:

  1. guarantee a minimum 70% attendance to the laboratory (5 classes of 3 hours on 7);

  2. play an active part in discussions and hands-on activities;

  3. write an individual final report ("travel diary") including all the topics and case studies discussed, according to the template provided by the instructor.

English