NMC Campus Observer

Studio One Interview: Teaching Accounting in SL to 700+ Students

CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine) : Aug 12, 2008 09:31am

Yesterday we took the massive audio equipment for NMC Studio One (that is a joke, we just use voice chat and WireTap Studio Pro) over to NMC Orientation to talk to Robins Hermano, who we learned is akin to the circus daredevils, by planning this fall to bring 700 of his accounting students into Second Life.

Robins RL avatar is Steve Hornik, an accounting professor in the College of Business Administration at University of Central Florida. Robins has been using Second Life actively for at least a year, and it was a few months ago when discussing NMC’s Second Life account creation and Orientation experience that he shared he had brought 200 students in through that service back in April 2008 (hmmm that is the cause of the nice spike in usage!).

He did laugh when I asked, “So what do accountants do in Second Life?” but quickly responded, “We count things!” Actually, as he shared, accountants are pretty active, with CPA Island and recent events like “XBRL and the International Future of Financial Reporting”. There is also an Second Life Association of CPAs and KAWG&F was the first accounting firm to open a working virtual business office in Second Life.

Check out his work on Really Engaging Accounting web site — and he did mention he is going to be sharing some results of his research into student engagement at the upcoming SLCC conference.

What caught our attentions was when he mentioned he was planning to bring more than 700 students through the registrations system for his upcoming fall semester accounting course — this is a basic required course in the UCF Business College.

In our recorded conversation (see below), Robins describes the ranges of ways he uses Second Life, with basic content like access to class content/recorded lectures and onto some custom interactive activities where students must manipulate a data modeler. He also shares some of his strategies for using Second Life with a large number of students (revolving around asynchronous design).

Studio One Interview with Robins Hermano (26:52 18.4 Mb MP3, apologies for poor audio quality in first half due to network flakiness)

We look forward to learning how the “big” class succeeds!

Story filed under: Audio / Video,Teaching and Learning,Tips
Tags: accounting, interview, teaching
See all stories by CDB Barkley (aka Alan Levine)