Rural network strategy for professional education on sustainable tourism

This project aims to develop, structure and share the professional knowledge about local -based sustainable tourism 4.0. We will involve European VET providers and educational institutions in a professional training and self-training process in order to face together the challenges of contemporary tourism.

Contemporary tourism businesses, in fact, in the last decade have been experiencing the challenge of new forms of tourism, but also a lack of an adapted and updated professional education in this field. All over Europe and beyond contemporary tourists want to enjoy authentic territorial realities together with local inhabitants. On the other hand, the increasing presence of sharing economy websites and apps encouraged several non-professionals to open up to tourism business. Both these phenomena contributed to the development of non-structured practices in the contemporary forms of hospitality and to the increasing obsolescence of traditional business models.

In this framework, we want to develop a strategic partnership with other European VET providers, higher education institutions, small and medium businesses and local administrations in order to structure these practices in a sharable form of professional knowledge.

We will work during 36 months with partners active in the following frameworks:

• rural tourism;
• bottom-up tourism development;
• local-based tourism;
• natural areas tourism;
• sustainable tourism;
• digital tourism;
• territorial marketing;
• territorial brand development.

The project will be structured in three phases:

• analysis of existing data about tourism, new forms of hospitality and enjoyment of territories, digital tourism;
• organisation of local experiences and practices in a sharable form of professional knowledge;
• development of tools for sharing the professional knowledge.

In particular, we will develop several intellectual outputs in order to create and to test a toolkit of educational materials for professional training and self-training of tourism students and professionals. Thus, we plan to publish a new output each semester on a dedicated website. Activities will be scheduled as follows:

• 1st semester: analysis of existing data about tourism, new forms of hospitality and enjoyment of territories, digital tourism in the local contexts of partners; publication of a report; transnational meeting.
• 2nd semester: development of educational units about tourism professional knowledge; transnational meeting.
• 3rd semester: development of an e-learning platform; adaptation of educational units to web-based education; transnational meeting.
• 4th semester: organisation of webinars in order to test the e-learning platform; transnational meeting.
• 5th semester: organisation of piloting processes in some professional schools: transnational meeting.
• 6th semester: international conference to discuss the results and the outputs of the process, as well as to officially open the educational materials to the public.