Abstract:

COVID-19 pandemic has forced many teachers to change their teaching methodologies without having time to reflect in-depth on the best option to follow. The use of tutored projects, Moodle resources and serious games has been some of the tools used by the teachers to give content to distance learning classes. Although these tools had been used in face-to-face teaching, they became especially useful at times when the student's autonomous work had to be encouraged.

The objective of this paper is to describe an experience carried out in International Accounting and Auditing course taught in the second year of the Degree in Business Administration of the Faculty of Economics and Business Sciences of the University of Cadiz (Spain). This subject belongs to a specialization in International Business which is taught totally in English. The learning objectives of this course are to learn about international accounting and auditing standards, to learn how to prepare accounting statements and how to audit them.

This experience consists of the transition from face-to-face teaching to distance teaching in which digital resources have been a great help, both for students and teachers, in maintaining the level of training required by the quality standards established by the education authorities. To this end, the first step was to rework the course syllabus to include new evaluation criteria that would give more weight to continuous assessment compared to the final exam. 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.

Moodle platform becomes a good tool to implement a space for interchanging materials (presentations, videos, audios, documents, …) and also to organize the virtual classes and tutorial sessions with one or more students. This is very important if we consider that all the instructions, communications, materials and online classes were conducted in a language that was not the mother tongue for either teachers or students. Moreover, the questionnaire tool of Moodle has been used to evaluating the theory concepts.

Given that the teachers need evidence about the student acquisition of knowledge and skills, they prepare an individual project in four steps to guarantee feedback to the student. In this way, the student would deliver each part of the project and the teacher would send him suggestions for improvement through Moodle mail. This is the aspect of this teaching resource that is most valued by students, as it allows them to know their mistakes and allows them to correct them. Thus, they managed to improve their final grade.

Another tool used to review and reinforce the contents worked on during the project is the serious game. The E-CORE tool has allowed us to design a game in which the students, now including the competence of working under pressure, must demonstrate that they know how to solve a series of situations (phases) of the project until the game is completed.

The results of this experience have been largely positive for the student who, in an evaluation made at the end of the course, have valued these resources very positively. From the teacher's point of view, although the workload has increased, the evaluation has been done continuously, resulting in much more evidence for each student, so the evaluation has been done in a more personalized and complete way.

Keywords:

Remote learning, business studies, serious game, project-based learning.