Assignment Criteria & Marking

The following criteria form the basis of the marking sheet for the major assignment:

• Understanding of the impacts of events
• Understanding of methods for assessing impacts
• Ability to implement methods
• Understanding of implications of research
• Referencing
• Overall presentation
• Ability to work as a group
• Group Work

  You must work in a group of 3 to 4. The same word count and expectations will apply regardless of group size. By week 4 you should inform your tutor of your group using the group sign-up sheet on the course site. By week 7 you should inform your tutor of any changes in your group. No changes are permissible after this time.

   

  Tips for working in groups:

  1. Meet at least once a week from week 3 onwards
  2. Make goals you plan to achieve each week and stick to them
  3. Ensure each team member contributes fairly. If any member of the team consistently fails to attend meetings, participate in discussions, or make a contribution, you may inform them that you no longer want them to be a member of the team UP UNTIL WEEK 7. Please advise your tutor if this occurs. After week 7 you may no longer eject a team member and you will have to compensate for their poor performance. No allowance will be made in the marking for a non-performing team member.
  4. The course convenor and tutors in the course will not solve team problems for you. It is your responsibility to MAKE IT WORK, and if you cannot make it work you should complete the assignment alone.
  5. As this assignment requires students to work in groups, the group collaboration and performance (e.g. conflict resolution, equity, time management and respect) of individual group members will also be assessed using SPARKplus, which is an online survey system. The system generates a factor that will be multiplied by the raw marks of both report and presentation given to the group to determine the mark of each individual member. The use of SPARK is a compulsory component of this assignment and failure to complete SPARK ratings will result in a penalty with 20% discount on this assessment item. More information and access to SPARKplus will be made available after Week 4.

   

  Submission by Blackboard

  All assignments must be submitted to Blackboard. You will also have the opportunity to submit a draft assignment to Blackboard to see whether there are any obvious problems. ANY ASSIGNMENT THAT IS NOT SUBMITTED TO Blackboard WILL NOT BE MARKED and you will lose 10% for every day the submission is late. Please note that at busy times of the year the Blackboard system can become congested. It is advisable to ensure your report is submitted to Blackboard 48 hours ahead of the due date.

   

  Please also note that just like Turn it in, Blackboard is a tool to assist in detecting plagiarism. Other detection tools may also be used. There is NO “acceptable” level of plagiarism, e.g. 10%. Some matching issues identified by Blackboard are legitimate and will attract no penalty, while other assignments may receive a zero matching report from Blackboard and still represent serious academic misconduct. The key to avoiding any academic integrity concerns is to NOT PLAGIARISE and ALWAYS REFERENCE CORRECTLY.

   

  Assignment Content

  The study should involve a review of literature to identify the potential impacts of tourism followed by a description of the methods to be used in the evaluation. You should also collect some data for your project and report the findings of this. A discussion of outcomes should also be included.

   

  The results of this research should be presented in a 3500 word report using the following headings:

  1. Introduction – This section talks about the objectives of the research and provides background information relevant to the project.
  2. Literature Review – For this section you will need to find relevant academic journal articles, read them and write a review summarising what has been found previously. Please note that it is expected that you would refer to scholarly literature with at least 5 references – not including those provided as part of the course material. This would be regarded as a minimum and those aspiring to achieve high grades would be advised to look more broadly (e.g. at least 10).
  3. Methods – In this section you should outline what research methods you would use to assess the impacts of tourism. You need to discuss the population of interest, what sampling methods you are using, how you will administer the research, what survey instrument or checklist would be used, and how the data would be analysed.
  4. Results – You should then collect some data. This does not need to be a large sample and it is fine to use a convenience sample including your friends and family. You should present the results of this data collection using basic statistics and graphs as appropriate.
  5. Discussion – In this section you should talk about why this type of research is important and how the outcomes of the research would be useful for improving the sustainability of tourism.
  6. References (APA style, refer to the Referencing Tool)
  7. Appendices
  8. After assignments have been submitted, in Weeks 10-12, the student group must present the results of their research project in a 10 minute presentation. The presentation should cover the key elements of your research project. Each student will be expected to talk for a similar amount of time.