AN INTERACTIVE EDU-TOURISM FRAMEWORK FOR MALACCA HERITAGE MOSQUES

Abstract

Educational tourism or Edu-tourism has been acknowledged as one of the tourism sectors that focuses on improving tourists’ experiences in travel destinations. The combination of education and tourism creates potential learning opportunities for tourists, especially in the cultural heritage sites. The current advancement of ICT has influenced the growth of the tourism industry in every kind of sector including enhancing learning opportunities by providing a portable platform to access information, interact with communities, and plan activities for tourists’ personal experiences. Unfortunately, there is a limited use of ICTs in mosque tourism especially in heritage mosques for educational tourism basis. Parallel to the rising interest in mosque tourism and recognition of Malacca city as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, heritage mosques in Malacca are famous for their history and cultural background, but they are not well presented and highlighted in the tourism product, hence reducing tourists’ learning experiences in historical aspect. Besides that, there are also limited resources and materials of Malacca heritage mosques either in printed or digital materials, and there has been little discussion and evidence-based studies on cultural activities in Malacca heritage mosques. In Malacca heritage mosques, QR Codes have only been implemented for services such as MySejahtera application, and donations, while declining the use of codes to access information about the mosque. Therefore, this thesis aims to determine the use of QR Codes to access online information in selected Malacca heritage mosques on purpose to improve tourists’ learning experiences and achieve interactive educational tourism in Malacca. This research has three objectives; to identify the mosque’s design features that can improve tourists' learning experience in selected Malacca heritage mosques, to examine the tourists’ travel motivation to Malacca, and to provide a framework for interactive educational tourism using QR Codes in selected Malacca heritage mosques. This study uses a mixed-method approach where a combination of questionnaire survey, structured observation, and semi-structured interview were used to achieve the objectives. A total of 600 surveys were distributed to tourists at the hotels around the case studies sites, and QR Codes were also placed at the selected Malacca heritage mosques for tourists to participate in the online survey. Overall, 350 surveys were collected and analyzed (58%). A structured observation was conducted to gather updated information on case studies including the historical background and the significant architectural settings, while a semi-structured interview was conducted to gather viewpoints and opinions of case studies from the academic practitioners and mosque’s staff perspectives. Consequently, triangulation is used to develop a comprehensive understanding of the research results and to test the validity of the findings through the convergence of information from several different sources. Conclusively, this research establishes a framework for interactive educational tourism in selected Malacca heritage mosques that would assist the development of web-based applications for other heritage buildings and the expansion of existing guidelines for heritage mosque development in Malaysia.