Supporting Graduate Attribute Development in Introductory Accounting with Student-Generated Screencasts

Abstract

In recent years educational, industry and government bodies have placed increasing emphasis on the need to better support the development of “soft” skills or graduate attributes within higher education. This paper details the adoption of a student-generated multimedia screencast assignment that was found to address this need. Implemented within a large introductory accounting subject, this optional assignment allowed undergraduate students to design, develop and record a screencast so as to explain a key accounting concept to their peers. This paper reports on the trial, evaluation and redesign of this assignment. Drawing on data from student surveys, practitioner reflections and descriptive analysis of the screencasts themselves, this paper demonstrates the ways that the assignment contributed to the development and expression of a number of graduate attributes. These included the students' skills in multimedia, creativity, teamwork and self-directed learning. Adopting free-to-use software and providing a fun and different way of learning accounting, this novel approach constitutes a sustainable and readily replicable way of supporting graduate attribute development. This paper contributes understandings that will be relevant to both researchers and practitioners.

Video killed the multiple-choice quiz: capturing pharmacy students’ literature searching skills using a screencast video assignment

“…While implementation of an assignment as this may have existed in the past, the ability to create this type of assignment is readily available to students via freely available software, institutionally subscribed resources, or their personal smartphone or tablet. Screencast assignments are documented in the literature of other disciplines like accounting [22][23][24] and education [25,26]. Faculty use of screencasts to deliver feedback on assignments is also demonstrated in the literature and was perceived by students taking part in the published studies to be more effective and favorable to written feedback [27][28][29][30].…”

Video Assessment Tasks in Tertiary Education: Practice and Experience in STEM

“…There is some informal advice and commentary on the use of videos as an assessment exercise: see for instance [CAL19], [Ale19],[wat20], but there appears to be only a small formal literature on video assessment exercises, little of which is oriented at quantitative subjects such as mathematics or computer science 2 . One instance in the formal literature [FDWT16] considers the use in accounting, primarily to promote soft skills (communication, project management, ...), which are of increasing importance in almost all workplaces.…”

“…• Modern students are very familiar with the short video format as they have grown up with YouTube et al, and many have already created their own videos [FDWT16]. Allowing students to express themselves through tools similar to those that they employ from day to day is more likely to engage them.…”

Student-generated multimedia for supporting learning in an undergraduate physiotherapy course

“…The creation and participation that students undertake in using Web 2.0 technologies can be an important part of student learning (Merchant, 2009). Early research on student-generated multimedia assignments suggests that they may afford experiential learning (Dyson, Litchfield, Lawrence, Raban, & Leijdekkers, 2009), graduate attribute development (Frawley et al, 2015), increased engagement (Wakefield, Frawley, Dyson, Tyler, & Litchfield, 2011) and new ways of representing and creating knowledge.…”