Being an active member of Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International (HSMAI) Hawaii, I have been involving our students to attend their educational workshops and training.

Native Hawaiʻian Hospitality Association (NaHHA) offered a series of Hawaiian culture training. Cultural experts and practitioners in the field, like Kainoa Horcajo, presented Hookipa Hawaiian style, Hawaiian language and wahi pana o Maui -place names and their meanings. Together with my HOST student attendees, we’ve gained and renewed our understanding of Hawaiʻi culture and applications in the travel and hospitality industry.

Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) Hawaii Student Forum provided timely and available career advice from successful professionals in the field. In the age of COVID-19 pandemic, it is not easy for our students to navigate career options. With all uncertainties before job search, student attendees and I were afforded time to get their questions answered by the HR practitioners. Changes in safety and sanitation protocols, and employers expectations were addressed in this forum.

I received a Certificate of Completion for my completion of participating in UHMC Summer Online Teaching Professional Development. I spent the summer and engaged in various summer professional development opportunities and learned so much to pivot. Transitioning from face to face class to online was a monumental change. Those PDs certainly helped me make the transition much less daunting.

Instructional designers from Kapiʻolani Community College and UHMC facilitated the activities in this PD on August 3-7, 2020. I’ve learned to use a Learning Path G.U.I.D.E. for active learning in online synchronous class meetings. Also, the 5E model (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate) was helpful. Since then, the strategies and activities learned from the workshop, such as using Google doc, Polling, Kahoot quiz, group work, etc. have been implemented in all my online synchronous classes.

I was selected as the ACTE Hawaiʻi Emerging Leaders group in 2019. At its 2020 Conference I gave a presentation on Game-Based Learning to Increase Critical Thinking Skills for Hospitality and Tourism Students. In addition, my colleagues and I attended various sessions presented . I found some tech tools and apps particularly useful and later integrated them into my class teaching.

My colleague Candace and I attended the 2019 APac-Euro joint Conference at the School of Hotel Management of Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Faculty and graduate students from universities in Europe and Asia Pacific gave presentations on innovative ways to solve problems in the hospitality and tourism industry. Industry practitioners also shared their best practices.

I taught operations management and leadership at our our partner institution -Shanghai Institute of Tourism, Shanghai Normal University between May 28 and June 4, 2019.

I taught the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Experience Economy course at Shanghai Institute of Tourism, Shanghai Normal University between May 28 and June 8, 2018. Not only junior and senior tourism students were in the audience, some of the faculty in the field attended my lecture sessions. Before and after the classes, I had fruitful discussions about their pedagogy and strategies in teaching hospitality and tourism.