In July of this year, Guo Qiang, Dean of the School of Tourism of Hainan University, won the second prize of the 2022 National Teaching Achievement Award in Higher Education for his project “Slack Season for Learning and Peaking Season for Internship: Innovation and Practice of the New Tourism Professional Training System in Hainan Free Trade Port”, marking a significant progress in the School’s efforts to promote research-based teaching and teaching-oriented research.

After his inauguration as Dean of the School of Tourism in 2019, Guo Qiang has paid close attention to the teaching problems and proposed a great number of solutions. Bench-marking those first-class tourism schools recognized by the MoE, Guo made further adjustments to the education plans for undergraduate and graduate students.

Under Guo Qiang’s leadership, the School of Tourism has redoubled efforts to strengthen its faculty pipeline. Attaching equal importance to faculty recruitment and training, the School has successfully introduced a great number of doctoral degree holders from overseas top-notch universities, achieving a 10% increase in the ratio of doctors to faculty.

“To achieve targeted undergraduate education, students will be grouped into two types in their sophomore year, namely the research-oriented and the employment-oriented. According to this classification, the School will assign corresponding tutors to each student and help them grow better.” Guo Qiang said.

“Cutting-edge scientific research is the backbone of high-quality teaching.” Guo Qiang believes that the latest research findings must be incorporated into teaching, so that students can get a better understanding of the latest information and knowledge. He usually plays a warm-up video or introduces a case study before his class to help students concentrate.

“As for the next step, we’ll focus on the status quo of Hainan’s tourism industry. We’ll comb through some tourism-related issues that need to be tackled and foster our students’ independent innovation capabilities in particular.” As courses and textbooks constitute the basis of education, Guo Qiang will redouble his efforts in textbook preparation and strive to overcome the weakness in the existing education plan. With all these being done, the School will prepare more and more high-calibre professionals for the tourism development of Hainan.