John McLachlan (Numeracy), Jacqui Bower (IT) and Margaret Montgomery (Communication) are currently running an integrated Core Skills project for students who are studying Travel Tourism.
Each student has to prepare an itinerary, brochure and presentation for a group of ten foreign visitors travelling from a college in another part of the world. Each task involves all three Core Skills. For example, to prepare a useful itinerary each student has to analyse reports about visitor behaviour and collate the statistics and trends uncovered in pie charts and graphs. This clearly involves numerical skills. At the same time, the itinerary has to be incorporated into a brochure aimed at the visitors, meaning the development of written communication and IT skills.
The team feel the project is also giving the students employability skills as they are working with VisitScotland reports the contents of which are relevant to many jobs in the tourist industry.
Student feedback has not yet been formally gathered but the class tutor, Nina Boyd, reports that the students all see the relevance of the Core Skill work they are doing to their vocational area and can also see how the Core Skill areas of Communication, Numeracy and IT often complement each other in the workplace.
The project will culminate in each student presenting the itinerary they have created. As such, they will explain the structure and content of the scehdule they have put together by referring to the research they have done. They will also present a budget breakdown (each student is working to a sum of £600-£800 per visitor for all costs except travel). As this presentation will involve all the Core Skills, all the project tutors will be present at this, as well as the vocational tutor.
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