LEARNING ABOUT SOCIAL ACCOUNTING: A WIKI-WEBQUEST

This paper examines how new communication and collaboration technologies can influence university students learning process for the area of accounting and specifically for social accounting. Students should be able to know and understand that companies’ reports must provide not only financial but also social information as a necessary complement to the first. Analysts are taking into consideration social issues when valuing companies and corporate governance, human rights or environmental behaviours have become key factors for investment decisions. In a general way, social accounting may be defined as the framework which allows businesses to account for their impact on society. For the Institute of Social and Ethical Accountability (1999), the terms social and ethical are taken together to refer to the organisational and behavioural systems within the organisation, and their direct and indirect impact on organisational activities with the stakeholders.

In Spain, since 2002, companies have to include in their annual reports information about their environmental impacts. Before that date only some companies used to provide environmental information following some European recommendations such as the EMAS or the ISO. In order to analyse the social behaviour of Spanish companies, students will be asked to act as advisors for a financial company and will have to determine: a) if companies follow legal requirements in relation to social information and what is its quality and b) if companies behave in accordance to the main principles of the ethical funds of the entity. The question would be if mere compliance with the law is ethical in itself. Students will be asked to determine if they recommend or not the investment.

With the introduction of European Credits Transfer System (ECTS), learning processes move towards different scenarios where the teacher becomes a facilitator of the process. New communication and collaboration education technologies may help this new approach. We propose the design of a webquest for Business Economics Students, specifically University accounting students, which will help them to learn more about financial statements analysis, social responsibilities and ethical behaviours. This tool should provide students with the skills to participate in the “knowledge society” and allow them to answer to the previous questions. A WebQuest is an inquiry oriented activity where most or all of the information used by participants is found on the internet. In a WebQuest, students have all the information available and they are required to answer questions or solve problems that will make them go further on their knowledge on the subject. Higher learning process is expected from the webquest use. This methodology will allow students to acquire the following generic competences included in the Tuning (2005) project: a) skills for analysis and summarising, b) capacities for putting knowledge into practice, c) general knowledge on the subject, d) dealing with information and collaboration. Research has shown that by integrating WebQuests into the classroom, student-involvement, student-interest, and student understanding of content has increased (Mc Gregor et al, 2004).