Professional Accounting

Please Note: This activity is a portion of a larger lesson. It is optimized for desktop use — we recommend viewing full-screen. 

Intro

Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand (CAANZ) is renowned for their strategic thinking and their rigorous professional training. To ensure they offer the world the sharpest minds in business and finance, CAANZ is responsive to ever-changing market needs and ensures candidates’ skills and knowledge remain relevant in today’s business world. CAANZ partnered with Smart Sparrow to design two engaging and interactive learning experiences for their postgraduate Financial Account and Reporting Unit.

Challenge

Each year, thousands of candidates from around the world enroll in CAANZ courses. Because candidates are operating from different locations and time zones, traditional learning experiences among them differ greatly. With high-level accounting concepts being taught to a geographically dispersed group, CAANZ needed to employ a standardized teaching method that could adequately prepare candidates for the real-world situations they would eventually encounter. Yet, it was also crucial that the instruction be flexible enough to adapt to the candidates’ varied learning styles and levels of comprehension.

The institution’s existing digital tools provided very little insight into how over 3700 students were performing as they took the lessons. And instructors were unable to pinpoint the specific areas of difficulty, which prevented them from being able to improve the lessons for future candidates.

To that end, CAANZ sought to incorporate a technology mediated mode of instruction to the mix. They wanted to develop an engaging and interactive experience to teach a rather complex accounting concepts that students usually struggled to grasp via conventional learning methods.

Solution

From these challenges sparked the idea of providing a more personalized learning experience to candidates – backed by real time learning analytics. In March 2014, CAANZ, in collaboration with Smart Sparrow, used the platform to create two adaptive lessons. The lesson, titled the FIN Adaptive Lesson, featured an interactive simulation that placed students in the shoes of an employee whose company had just acquired controlling interest in another company. Students were tasked with preparing the journal entries that are required for the consolidation of a new company.

From design to execution, the FIN Adaptive Lesson mirrored the experiences that students could expect to encounter in real-world situations. The aesthetic design and premise emulated a realistic office setting, raising the stakes and increasing the students’ levels of engagement. This allowed for a cognitive connection between knowledge and the practical application of their skills.