RETHINKING EVALUATION IN DISTANCE LEARNING OF AUDITING

The extraordinary situation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many teachers to change their teaching methodologies. The use of tutored projects, flipped classrooms and even serious games has been a strategy followed by many teachers to give content to distance learning, thus promoting the autonomous work of the student. Such tools were already being used before, but thanks to this crisis, they have become the remedy to provide a follow-up of the student and to facilitate his evaluation in the distance.The objective of this paper is to describe an experience carried out in the course of Auditing, located in the third year of the Degree in Finance and Accounting of the Faculty of Economics of the University of Cadiz. The learning objectives of this course are, firstly, to know what auditing is, how it is performed and what its objectives are; secondly, to know what attributes an audit professional should possess; and finally, to learn how to operate in a professional environment characteristic of auditing. To be able to work on these lines of training with the students we have used three tools as follows. Firstly, we have designed an audit project in which all the students were included, but each one with its specific tasks. The project recreates an audit firm in which the teacher is the audit partner, and therefore distributes the work and draws up the conclusions, and the students are the different members of the firm. This firm receives an audit assignment that they must attend to. An audit programme is drawn up and each student must carry out a series of assignments in a chronological manner. In this way, the student must look for information, understand the situation and apply the regulations to carry out the assignment. If the task was well done, the student would promote in the audit firm and in the next part of the project he could supervise the work done by another colleague. Supervision and quality control are fundamental attributes in the auditor's work, and in this way, they learn these attributes. All phases of the audit process: planning, execution and reporting are developed in the project. Another tool used is the flipped classroom. It has been used to teach how the auditor's behaviour is developed in front of the company being audited. For this purpose, students have watched videos using the E-VOLI tool which has then given rise to debates and class activities. This tool allows the teacher to know what doubts or comments the student has from the video and thus can better prepare the next class. Finally, to review and reinforce the contents worked on during the project, the E-CORE tool has allowed us to design a serious 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 tools 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.