PPIA FEB UI General Lecture: Using Technology in Accounting Teaching and Research – A Complement or A Substitute? Lesson from Covid-19 Era
Nino Eka Putra ~ PR of FEB UI
DEPOK – (20/11/2020) Ferdinand Siagian, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Accounting, Minnesota State University Mankato, was a resource person in the General Lecture organized by the Postgraduate Program in Accounting Science (PPIA) FEB UI, entitled “Using Technology in Accounting Teaching and Research: A Complement or A Substitute? Lesson from Covid-19 Era” on Friday (20/11/2020). This event was opened by Dr. Ancella A. Hermawan, Chair of the FEB UI Accounting Department and moderated by Yulianti Abbas, Ph.D., Chair of the PPIA FEB UI Study Program.
In his presentation, Ferdinand Siagian said that the existence of Covid-19 has opened up our thoughts through the utilization of various kinds of technological platforms that facilitate human activities. It is undeniable that technological advances will have an impact on lecturers in the field of accounting. For example, companies engaged in accounting visiting students at Mankato University to have discussions on how they conduct online audits, tax, and consulting during the pandemic without direct meeting with clients.
Mankato University refers to 3 scenarios, first, if the number of positive Covid-19 reach 300-400 people, then face-to-face learning is still applicable. Second, if the situation worsens, hybrid learning will be carried out by limiting the number of meetings and people. Third, full learning is carried out online, due the emergency and alert condition.
From this case, Ferdinand implemented it in a research, that accounting education was originally taught face-to-face, but with technological developments it has allowed changes in the form of online (hybrid) and full online (synchronous, asynchronous).
“There are three perspectives for future research. First is a performance perspective, meaning that it may be replaced by a machine but it must be guaranteed that the performance between using physical faculty services and a machine will be the same. Second, from faculty and employer’s perspective, online option will not trouble the faculty and employers. Third, from student perspective, that is to discuss students need in learning, whether to study without lecturers or use only machines in their learning process,” explained Ferdinand.
Technology and resources are now offered by publishers, whether the teaching faculty can be replaced or not, with intelligent adaptive study plans, automatically graded quizzes, automatically graded HW problems, automatically graded tests, e-books, power point, sample videos, automatic grading. “All of these depends on the needs of students, whether they are ready to study without teaching faculty, measure students’ opinions and views, and measure student performance. However, this research provides a study that the quality of faculty must be improved with various innovations to enable them to compete with technology,” concluded Ferdinand. (htjp)
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