5. Openly using AI in a French Hotel Management School: Learning about Sustainability, Including all Students and Challenging the Narrative 

Authors:  Loykie Lominé, Raphaël Taillandier and Alexis Bontems

Institution: École de Savignac, France

Situation

The award-winning École de Savignac is one of the most prestigious hotel schools in France. Founded in 1988, it is located in the Dordogne in the southwest of France, near Périgueux and Bergerac. It offers two qualifications: a Bachelor and an MBA in Hospitality Management, with approximately 300 undergraduate students and 100 postgraduate students who spend half of their studies undertaking professional internships in the hotel industry. The context of this case study is a series of 3-day courses about sustainable tourism management (offered to all 2nd and 3rd year students) where GenAI tools (such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot) are openly and systematically used in class with students. 

Task

Our three objectives regarding GenAI are:

1. To benefit from the numerous learning opportunities that GenAI offers us;

2. To demystify the pedagogical use of GenAI; 

3. To reflect on the potential of GenAI in a professional context (the hotel industry) and its limits (it is an extraordinary, groundbreaking tool with immense potential, but it remains a tool amongst others).

We use GenAI in three ways:  

1. To explore initial ideas, with given prompts (for instance about sustainable practices for breakfast buffets in hotels) as if we were using up-to-date, all-knowing, interactive books;

2. To compare the output in a range of languages, which gives students the opportunity to further improve their linguistic skills (and learn specialised, technical terms about sustainability, not only in French and English, but also in German, Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew etc);

3. To explore more specific topics (combining GenAI and ‘traditional’ internet searches, including online videos and social media posts). 

Action

The dominant academic narrative (in the French HE context) is rather against the use of GenAI, with the fear that some students might exploit GenAI as a shortcut to cheat on their assignments, raising issues of academic integrity. We flip this model, openly adopting GenAI as our pedagogical starting point. 

We use GenAI every morning to learn about a range of topics (for instance: how to organise a sustainable, small-scale family event). Later, we apply these initial, theoretical ideas to specific contexts (for instance: organising a quinceañera, a bar mitzvah or a gender reveal party in a specific hotel, given its facilities, function rooms available etc); at that stage, GenAI is too generic to be efficiently deployed. 

The two main benefits are: 

1. This innovation is scalable: it can be used across all subjects, although a change of pedagogical paradigm may be needed, regarding:
(i) the open use of GenAI (letting students use prompts, search, read contents, compare answers and learn that way);   

(ii) the need to revise and adapt the assessment tasks (to ensure that what is eventually assessed is students’ own learning and not contents created by GenAI). 

2. This innovation is accessible and inclusive; it can actually provide personalised support to learners who may otherwise struggle to grasp some topics; it makes everyone feel included, irrespective of academic skills, SpLDs or other learning differences, and English level (not all students are fluent in English).  

Results

In every iteration of the courses, our 3 objectives are always met:

1. Students benefit from the learning opportunities that GenAI offers them;

2. Students realise that GenAI can be used for positive learning purposes;  

3. Students reflect on the advantages and disadvantages of GenAI, both in general and in hotel contexts, as illustrated by Figure 1.     

Figure 1 Posting on padlet by student author (Alexis) reflecting on the use and limitations of GenAI tools (13/12/2023)  

Source: https://padlet.com/Loykie/limitsofIA13122023

This approach is innovative, compared to a tendency in French academia to hold a negative view of GenAI, seen as a ‘lazy thing for lazy students’.  Boosted by students’ positive feedback, the course leader author has led Staff Development sessions to showcase the pedagogical potential of GenAI. Non-academic staff who attended (professional services: librarian, QA officers, student support etc) were very interested, but in contrast, academic staff kept voicing arguments against the use of GenAI and sounded reluctant to embrace any change. This is also cultural and subject-specific: hospitality education has rather conservative values, reflected in its dress codes, strict systems and formal procedures -- but as the hospitality industry is already embracing GenAI (for example for promotion through social media), hospitality education is bound to follow suit.  

Stakeholder Commentary        

1. In every course satisfaction survey, students highly praise the way we use GenAI in an open, systematic way to enrich learning. Some students discover GenAI for the first time and get very enthusiastic about its potential (beyond our class activities about sustainable tourism); many start using Copilot regularly, instead of Google searches. 

2. On 12 December, the School was visited by a delegation of Chinese professors (as part of an international partnership). They came to observe our class for 20 minutes and were intrigued by how openly we use GenAI as a learning tool. They asked many questions such as “is it allowed?” and “why do you do it?” (we enjoyed answering their questions!)    

Going beyond GenAI, we are now exploring the pedagogical and professional use of images created using AI tools, as illustrated by Figure 2. 

Figure 2 Co-author team (image created by student co-author Alexis, 20/3/2024 using Bing AI) 

Author biographies

Loykie Lominé 

Loykie Lominé had a first academic career in England, where he gained his NTF, and now works as Professor of Tourism at the École de Savignac (Hotel Management School) in France where he increasingly uses AI in class with students.

Raphael Taillandier and Alexis Bontems 

Raphael Taillandier and Alexis Bontems are both in their 2nd year at the École de Savignac. They speak French, English and Spanish and want to start their career in the luxury hospitality sector. They use AI in class (and love it), which made them interested in contributing to this case study.