Re-Strategizing Tourism and Hospitality Assessments in a Post-COVID-19 Higher Education Landscape

COVID-19 has significantly disrupted global landscapes and forced a quick adaptation towards new ways of conducting higher education, with almost all tertiary institutions compelled to embrace online teaching and learning quickly. In addition, this crisis presents an opportune moment to reflect on the why and how higher education assessments should be framed through a blue ocean strategy for disciplines such as tourism and hospitality. While the blue ocean strategy has emerged within tourism and hospitality practice, little is known as to how this is manifested in the context of educational settings, and especially academic voices as part of such radical transformations following COVID-19. To address this gap in knowledge, this research traces the journeys of 16 Chinese academics transitioning as educators before, during, and after the outbreak of COVID-19 through the theory’s four actions framework of eliminate, reduce, create, and raise. The findings revealed how the pandemic challenged their philosophical stances of who we are as assessors, the dilemmas of technology-mediated learning and assessment, indicators of professional development, and assessing outside one’s comfort zone. Derived from these outcomes is a conceptual framework around a blue ocean strategy to repurpose the role of assessments from a narrative of what and how, to what now and how else of tourism and hospitality education.