Sustainable Tourism: Society & Environmental Aspects (edX)

Join this course if you want to learn where this growth is coming from and what the effects will be on the social and natural environment. You’ll be challenged with more critical reflections of an industry steeped in comfort and enjoyment.

You’ll also discover that tourism is more than just a powerful economic force. Tourist activities affect the environment of travel destinations and influence cultures worldwide. Tourism is very sensitive to global transformations such as changing consumer behaviour, economic developments, climate change, epidemics, or acts of terrorism. Tourism is in fact a complex phenomenon.

To explore the development of the tourism phenomenon and begin to build your own reflections on the industry, you'll be exposed to a variety of weekly insights throughout the course. These include historical backgrounds, a variety of social science approaches, common theoretical constructs, related systemic observations, and exposure to environmental, social and economic implications of tourism.

Based on weekly reflection exercises, you'll be challenged to form your own argument for a specific tourism development of your choice. You'll also help others in providing and receiving meaningful feedback on their critical reflections of tourism phenomena.

This course is part of the Tourism in Transition: Exploring a Sustainable Future Professional Certificate.

What you'll learn

- How to view tourism as a complex social and environmental phenomenon

- An overview of global tourism development in its historical context

- Ways to distinguish differences in the social study of tourism

- How to conceive of the sheer size and systemic development of tourism

- Analysis of the mutual relationships between tourism and its environment

Syllabus

Module 1: Introduction & Overview

What is tourism, and how can you study it from a social sciences point of view?

Module 2: History of global tourism development

Where does tourism come from? We go back in time to understand where our contemporary tourism practices originate.

Module 3: Scientific approaches and systemic observations

What are typical social science approaches to tourism; including behavioral, cultural, and more critical observations? And to what kind of observations do these approaches lead?

Module 4: Key theories and global flows

Take notice of a set of typical theoretical concepts used in tourism studies, and become acquainted with how global tourism developments run parallel with rapidly developing flows of people, goods, technology, information, and capital.

Module 5: Environmental impacts of tourism

Take the main economic, socio-cultural, and environmental interactions and impacts generated by and in tourism.

Module 6: Synthesis and looking forward

Finalize your own argument related to a tourism development of your choice, and become familiar with the science of sustainable tourism.