Abstract
Sustainability challenges in tourism are widely discussed. There is a huge need for education in the field of destination development. Students require appropriate problem-solving skills. This article examines the master’s course in destination development at Uppsala University, Campus Gotland, with the aim of increasing students’ skills in solving sustainability problems. The course took place in the spring semester of 2020 with the main goal of improving students’ skills in formulating and solving sustainable challenges in groups. This was achieved by activating the heterogeneity of the group, seeking relevant information and facts, and organising and carrying out the task with a design-thinking methodology. Students were provided with real problems or challenges by tourist companies, authorities and other interest groups on the island of Gotland. The purpose of this study is to describe the group of students as well as joint learning processes and knowledge needed in the work towards sustainable solutions. The major implication of the study is that the course gave the students the opportunity to deepen their understanding of both the barriers and benefits of working with heterogeneous groups. Furthermore, the study revealed a number of factors that all organisations would need to take into account in order to improve the effectiveness of their work towards sustainable solutions.
Highlights
The labour market is constantly evolving and requires new skills, knowledge and qualifications over time
Design thinking begins with a set of principles that frame a way to see problems and solutions from a new point of view
The responses of the students are based on the different phases of their process, and the answers here are compiled using the same steps as the tool for problem solving in design thinking: “empathise”—understanding and defining the problem; “ideate” i.e., generating new ideas; “prototype”—the building of real tactile representations i.e., exploring; “test”—returning to users for feedback; and “implement”—presenting the solutions, i.e., materialising
Summary
The labour market is constantly evolving and requires new skills, knowledge and qualifications over time. Knowledge-based economies of today require people with more developed and relevant transversal skills, such as the ability to think critically, take initiative, solve problems and work collaboratively. Innovation is becoming a requirement and a competitive advantage in working life It is an increasingly demanding and important issue. The current trend in higher education is improving creativity and individual students’ thinking by bringing them closer to the world and complex problems that they will find [3]. All of these skills are highly demanded in solving the sustainability problems of modern day [4]. Moving towards a more sustainable way of living will inevitably require some radical changes in attitudes, values and behaviour [5,6,7]
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