Abstract:

The objective of this paper is to describe an experience carried out in Financial Statements course taught in the third year of the Degree in Accounting and Finance of the Faculty of Economics and Business Sciences of the University of Cadiz (Spain). The learning objectives of this course focus on the preparation of the different accounting statements that companies must report in response to current regulations. This experience tells how the transition from face-to-face to distance teaching caused by the outbreak of the Covid-19 health crisis has taken place. Based on an evaluation based primarily on a final exam, the first step was to rework the course syllabus to include new evaluation criteria that would give more weight to continuous assessment. These new criteria had to be accompanied by a proposal of activities that would allow continuous monitoring of the progress of each of the students.

When adapting this subject to a distance learning teaching the main problem arising is how to get the student to learn the elaboration of accounting statements autonomously. The set of financial information that a company is obliged to produce is made up of five different statements. Since it is not possible to observe the students' progress through practical in-person seminars, the option of doing it remotely requires that each student has to work with a different case. But preparing a case is very time-consuming for the teachers since it involves a very large volume of information. Preparing a case, statement and solution, for each of the 70 students of the subject, becomes an unmanageable workload.

The answer came from SIMUDATA, a web application for the generation of multiple case studies on economic-financial information of companies designed by the University of Granada (Spain). This application not only generates the statements and solutions of the case studies based on real companies but also corrects the solutions of the students giving them feedback so that they can improve their delivery. Besides, following the assessment included by teachers, it calculates the grade that the student would get based on the successes achieved.

Although the students have evaluated the tool very positively through a questionnaire at the end of the course, the best evaluation is obtained from the teachers. The workload that would have been involved in the continuous assessment of this subject due to the high number of students and the complexity of the cases to be developed has been significantly reduced thanks to this application. In this way, the evaluation has been done in a more personalized and complete way, resulting in much more evidence for each student. This application is an example of how investment in digital teaching tools can not only facilitate the work of the teacher but also enrich the teaching and learning process. The time that does not have to be consumed in the heavy correction of assignments, can be dedicated to working in a more personalized way with the student, promoting a better understanding of the contents of the subject and, therefore, facilitating their learning.

Keywords:

Distance learning, business studies, web application, autonomous work.