“Accounting is the language of business.” – Warren Buffett.
The professional field of accounting involves the measurement, process and communication of both financial and non-financial information of economic entities, businesses and corporations.
The Senate Select Committee on the Future of Work and Workers (2018) had proven that the Australian government and student survey responses place a heavy emphasis on employability or professional skills as a key priority for universities. An important field as it is, accounting education is built upon strong regulatory requirements and a necessity to equip graduates with the skills and capabilities of effective communication and proactive responses towards stakeholders’ needs, the ability to apply theoretical knowledge to real-world business situations, and also face complex, challenging, diverse and uncertain problems.
With all this in mind, the undergraduate capstone units at Deakin University are created with the purpose of facilitating higher-order learning through knowledge of individual units that are holistically and comprehensively combined together into a cohesive whole body of knowledge (Gresch & Rawls, 2017). Furthermore, leveraging on the support of digital technologies to provide an authentic learning and assessment experience, the capstone units require students to integrate their learning process from individual units (Holdsworth, Watty, & Davies, 2009), done through involving authentic and complex real-world problems such that students have the opportunity to prepare for their careers in the workforce (Lombardi, 2007; Milligan et al., 2020) and develop the professional skills commensurate with employers’ requirements (Milligan, 2020).
Deakin University’s undergraduate capstone units exercise an innovative approach that scaffolds employability skills through authentic activities over the course of an 11-week unit. This learning experience for students balance an array of educational activities and assessments that acts as the foundation of the over-arching focus on professional skills, through four main components, namely Linking Theory to Practice (Week 1-3), Simulation Experience (Week 4-6), Career Preparedness and Employment Skills (Week 7), and Case Studies (Week 8-11).
MonsoonSIM’s business simulation and gamification education platform is integrated into the Simulation Experience component in Weeks 4-6. Working in a simulated environment enables the students to develop crucial professional skills, among them communication, problem solving, adaptability and teamwork. Additionally, students practice the experiential learning cycle of continuous feedback, practice and self-reflection. MonsoonSIM’s platform had been tailored to suit the activities according to Deakin University’s vision, allowing the configuration of the number of business decisions, its complexity and the business environment itself. Each different scenarios, constraints and modules in each learning week constantly challenges students, the curriculum itself designed to engage the students into being critical thinkers and sharp decision-makers across 13 interdependent business departments. Furthermore, through MonsoonSIM, students can progress their professional skills in great strides, whether it be in managing a variety of accounting decisions based on financial, operational and market information.
“This experiential simulation allows students to learn ‘by doing’ and fosters strategizing in situations fraught with ‘volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity’.” States the “Using Experiential Learning Theory to Improve Teaching and Learning in Higher Education” by Dr. Leong & Dr. Ma from Singapore University of Social Sciences.
MonsoonSIM’s simulation provides a learning journey that fosters experiential learning, starting from experiencing both successes and failures in running their “virtual” company in a simulated environment (concrete experiences), to triggering a deeper understanding of the role accounting information and integrated thinking plays to inform sound business decision-making (reflective observation), to formulating the business and advisory approach students take (abstract concepts) and followed by its application in their future roles and careers (active experimentation).
“One great advantage of this simulation is that the student businesses sell the same products and therefore compete against each other in the class for customers and employees. This provides an interesting intersection between collaboration and competition. Students learn to collaborate and negotiate in a team for internal allocations of resources and cross-functional spending whilst setting a congruent goal for team success.” States the ‘Designing hybrid and online capstone experiences for accounting students’ research paper by Christine Contessotto, Edwin KiaYang Lim, and Harsh Suri of Deakin University.
The research paper also explains that the simulation is paused periodically in classes with the purpose for the lecturer to provide comparisons (in numbers and in graph form) of the various team businesses. This allows students to reflect and proactively review their team decisions and manage the business challenges they face. Moreover, this prompts the discovery that students’ own business decisions do not allows achieve their expected results, thus pushing the students to consider the cause and effect and contrast their actions with their competitors (Milohnić & Licul, 2018).
“We encourage teams to run the ‘best’ business by setting different key performance targets each week, including a range of financial and non-financial performance measures, which motivates students to make comprehensive, balanced, and adaptive decisions.” Deakin University adds.
With over 2,500 students having completed the capstone units, student evaluations have revealed high levels of satisfaction and engagement with how the capstone had replicated authentic real-world experiences and given students the chance to work together, collaborate and experience the dynamics of a distributed team.
“Using an off-the-shelf industry-relevant cloud-based simulation software enabled us to focus our attention on the learning activities and avoid other externalities of setup, support and delivery of the simulation tool.” The Deakin University research paper remarks on MonsoonSIM’s invaluable support in their capstone units.
Charles Lyell once said, “Never call an accountant a credit to his profession; a good accountant is a debit to his profession.”
Given that MonsoonSIM offers a unique, experiential learning opportunity for students and transforms the way accounting concepts are taught in class, it can indeed be said that MonsoonSIM is a debit to enriching accounting education in a way where there’s more to learn, easier to learn!
To see the original paper, click here: https://www.monsoonsim.com/depo/images/doc/papermsim6.pdf