I first created this approach for my Fall 1998 AC101 classes. More than 700 hours were spent developing the lectures for AC101 and 102. The approach has been extremely successful both in terms of general student satisfaction and in terms of how well students learn. The toolkit was distributed to 15,000 accounting educators around the world. The objective of the approach is to enable students to learn more accounting than they currently do in a physical classroom.
Students sitting in a classroom are typically quite heterogeneous.
Their aptitude for accounting ranges from poor to outstanding, their interest in accounting ranges from none to great and their backgrounds for the course range from inadequate to excellent. The result is that some students are over challenged and others are bored. The virtual classroom approach allows all students to master the lecture material at their own pace. Having used interactive multimedia for all my accounting courses since the Fall 1992 semester, I was in an ideal position to upgrade all the computerized materials I developed during the six-year period and move them to a virtual environment. The interactive keypads which I used so successfully to provide feedback and motivate students to learn are now on the screen instead of in their hands.