How I "Re-mixed" a Typical Accounting Course into a Mystery Adventure

By Sean Diaz

When working with faculty on an online course, their first question is usually, "How much work is this going to be?" And I get it! The last thing you want to do in planning for an online course is to be told by an instructional designer that you have to completely start from scratch! But at the same time, we know that online courses that just repurpose passive lectures, slides, and handouts can seem like a second class learning experience for students.

So what if instead of just repurposing materials used for face-to-face c0urses, we could "re-mix" it for a new medium?

For this course, I've used a story about a growing company and a new hire in the accounting department to thread together some traditional teaching materials into a new format that allows students to sit at the center of the story.

I wanted to give students a sense of what it would be like to use the skills of a brand new accountant to gain insight into a the fundamentals of a particular business. So, this course starts out with putting the student in the shoes of a character I've invented, a new hire in the accounting department at a company I call EnCorp, who is just completing their training program. I chose a to put students in the role of trainee rather than an experienced accountant so that I could put some of the asynchronous teaching content in the context of their training.

In this blog post, I'm going to walk through one lesson to give you a sense of how you can use a model like this in your own course.

Putting Students at the Center of the Story

In this sample lesson, students will be asked to review two "corporate training modules" which come in the form of 5-7 teaching videos that are not, on their face, dissimilar from what students would see in a traditional asynchrnous online accounting course. But here, instead of talking about new ideas in the abstract, they are all tied to one extende case study that will run throghout the course. will also be asked to solve problems based on situations that come up with EnCorp's accounting and reporting. These problems are really just simple adaptations of problems I would usually give to students in a problem set, but instead of inventing lots of typical hypothetical situations for their problems, every problem fits into the context of EnCorp and some of the decisions their senior managers are making that could be suspect.

I start the course by telling students they've "accidentally" received an email they should not be seeing.

Balancing Fact and Fiction

I commonly work with professors to find examples of corporate wrongdoing as a to introduce new topics in business education. It is a practice that fits in well with the case based approach favoried in leading business schools, and aligns with student interest in notable examples they will be familar with in news stories.

For this project, I wanted to move beyond finding interesting examples from the headlies, and instead tie every exercise and assessment to the story of a fictitious company. This puts the student atg the center of scandal they would normally read about with the distance of time and of. I think students can relate to this because many of them will be in this position soon when they become new graduates who are looking for work. In future lessons, I will reveal how there are many real life parallels to EnCorp and show them the real companies I modeled these situations after.

By placing the student in the role of a trainee at a fictional company, and then introducing them right away to a potential problem with the companies reporting that they have only learned about by mistake, we are creating a strong motivation for the student "character" to try and figure out the mystery.

Incorporating my "Regular" Teaching Materials

In this activity, we ask students to think about the accounting cycle, and ask them to watch a lecture on the accounting cycle that was adapted from the instructors typical lecture on the topic. There is nothing about Encorp in this particular video, so in a paired activity, I ask them to interpret some of the ideas in the lecture and apply it in the context of the EnCorp narrative. This allows the instructor to reuse this peice of video content in other places, including her residential residential (in person) courses, so it's time well spent to make it.

Tying Assessments Back to the Narrative

At the end of the first lesson, this summative assessment brings together the narrative and non-narrative parts of the course together. It asks students to think about a basic topic of accounting, but applied to a specific situation that has grabbed their interest in the context of the emerging problems at EnCorp.

Balancing your time with the creation of a studen centered experience

Redeveloping your course for an online format doens't have to be a complete reinvention. In fact, for most professors, it's simply not a realistic option. But finding small ways to weave some of your most well devleoped lectures into a story that will build interest and motivation for your students, while at the same time engaging your own sense of exploration and creativity...that's a project your can approach with excitement.

If you would like to learn more about this lesson, and other ideas for adapting your course using narrative, let's talk. Fill out the form below, or just send me an email at sld413@nyu.edu.