Critical Reviews of Contemporary Practice

With the existence of the Hospitality, Leisure, Sport and Tourism Network and the Business, Management, Accountancy and Finance Network coming to an end, and as a final flourish to further extend and enhance the resources available to those in the subject communities which we have supported, we commissioned a number of reviews of contemporary practice in learning, teaching and assessment. Through a competitive bidding process, we selected from our subjects communities reviewers with experience and expertise in particular areas of learning, teaching and assessment to investigate current practice and to review some of the issues associated with those areas. Their reports reflect the innovation and creativity in approaches to learning, teaching and assessment which we know characterise the BMAF and HLST subjects; changes in practice which have evolved over the last decade; and the accommodation in our subjects as "established practice" of approaches which might earlier have been viewed as experimental but for which convincing evidence of effectiveness has been collected and disseminated.

The reports provide a measure of the changes which have occurred over the lifetimes of the BMAF and HLST Networks, both in context and practice, and benchmarks of contemporary practice in learning, teaching and assessment against which teachers, course teams and managers can judge their own practice. We hope that they will inform curriculum development and, most importantly, stimulate continuing enhancement of the learning opportunities and experiences we offer to our students.

Our thanks to all those who undertook these reviews within the limited time scale available. Their approaches differ and are described in the individual reports. Each involved a review of current literature (itself providing a useful resource), a survey of current practice, and the collection of a number of examples of practice. We hope that you will enjoy reading them all to discover the richness of contemporary practice in the BMAF and HLST subjects, as well as using them to develop particular aspects of your own curricula.