Student engagement is crucial for learning, and especially so in online learning. For a student to be a successful online learner, they need to engage with the online content, with their peers and with the educator. This article presents an accounting module of a fully online degree where engagement was purposefully integrated using an online engagement framework. Within this framework, the educator regularly interacted with the students to ensure that they were engaging with the online material and a group task was assigned where students had to collaboratively construct knowledge and display it in a video. An action research design was followed to determine the degree of engagement within the module and to improve on it for future modules. Results indicate that regular interaction did result in more students being active and ultimately successfully completing the module. Student reflections on the group task indicated that there are definite benefits in creating knowledge collaboratively although the format in which it should be presented needs to be reconsidered.
Higher education institutions in South Africa are experiencing the effects of massification and diversification of the student body, necessitating students to take more responsibility for the management of their own learning. The education of chartered accountants in South Africa reflects this reality. Feedback on assignments and formative assessments is regarded as a key mechanism to facilitate students' development as independent learners. The practical logistics of providing one-onone feedback to an ever-increasing number of students necessitate a concerted change in feedback practice. The goal of this article is to report on the experience of undergraduate accounting students regarding the revised and more detailed system of feedback on assignments and formative assessments that was introduced by the authors. The researchers are of the opinion that the questionnaire cannot be tested at other universities, unless the total approach to feedback is instituted and supported. The research is underpinned by the theoretical framework of self-directed learning. Pragmatism and a mixed methods methodology is the relevant research paradigm underlying this inquiry and the concurrent triangulation approach is considered appropriate to this investigation. The study found that students were of the opinion that the new form of feedback on assessment enabled them to identify typical mistakes, recognise their individual strengths and weaknesses, gain from constructive criticism and conduct regular self-assessment. The quantitative inquiry clearly showed that students were overwhelmingly satisfied and impressed with the features of the revised strategy of feedback. However, the peer-assessment feature of the strategy was not received as positively, as students expressed anxiety in assessing their peers. The study has proven that a concerted change in focus could assist in student self-assessment and self-directedness.
KeywordsFeedback on student assessment, accounting assessment, accounting education, formative assessment, peer assessment _______________________________ *Prof N Stegmann is an associate professor in the Department of Accountancy, University of Johannesburg, South Africa [nerines@uj.ac.za]. #Ms M Malan is a senior lecturer in the
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