Creative graphics education potential for creativity of hospitality students via virtual environment

Abstract

Although there are many applications for hospitality education via Virtual Environment (VE) platforms, such as role play, and destination exploring, researchers in the field are not considering their use as a graphic design tool for achieving creativity during hospitality education. In addition, spatial related graphic design, such as exhibition design and hotel room design, is an increasingly challenging task for hospitality students. Hence, this study aims at proposing the implementation of potential creative graphics design courses for creativity of hospitality students by use of VE platform. In order to explore the possibility of exploiting the VE platform to achieve meaningful learning of creativity, an evolving virtual learning environment (VLE) facilitated with features that are convinced to be contributive to the proposed educational purpose is being constructed in the virtual world. This study examines previous studies on virtual worlds to facilitate hospitality education via literature review; constructs 3D replica virtual hotel in VLE with its lobby, café, ball-room, restaurant, multifunctional room, and guest rooms; creates experiments of mechanism of re-al-time interactive and automatic toolkits within VE and course materials for assisting student learning in hospitality, a ‘Real-Virtual’ teaching approach, which is in line with their real-life teaching module of hotel guest room design, and events design and exhibition design. This paper reveals that the VE provides a new podium to stimulate creativity potential of hospitality students for their degree module works through doing graphic aesthetics and experiences for both the creating the works and the user interacting with the works.