Computers BITE accounting education

Abstract

The recent establishment of the £20 million Teaching and Learning Technology Programme by the Universities' Funding Council in the UK provides one of the largest boosts for IT and education since PLATO (in the USA) and NDPCAL (in the UK). This note describes the BITE project which is part of the above programme and highlights some of the problems that have affected both the development and evaluation of accounting courseware in the past. By using a strong interdisciplinary team of software, educational and subject specialists, the project hopes to overcome some or all of these problems. 1

Examining the Skills Debate in Scotland

“…Evidence suggests that university teaching was previously dominated by the acquisition of accounting techniques and identifying best practice (Zeff, 1989;Williams, 1993;Woods and Higson, 1996), and in doing so, accounting education failed to enable graduates to be immediately useful in the workplace (Needles and Powers, 1990). Accounting education also failed to equip students with a sophisticated capacity to enquire, reason, conceptualise and evaluate (Gray et al, 1994).…”

“…Many researchers in accounting education have investigated the role skills play in graduateness and how student skills match employer's expectations of skills needed for a career in accounting (Williams, 1993;Zaid and Abraham, 1994;Morgan, 1997;Francis and Minchington, 1999;Hassall et al, 1999Hassall et al, , 2003Hassall et al, , 2005Arquero Montano et al, 2001Gammie et al, 2002;Tempone and Martin, 2003;Tan et al, 2004). These studies detail a skills gap that points to accounting graduates lacking, amongst others, communication and problem solving skills expected by the profession.…”