24 by 7 - The acquisition of generic skills for the new millennium

Similarly the University of New England articulates and endorses as outcomes a range of generic attributes undergraduate students are expected to attain. The trend has arisen, in part, out of a recognised need to have an adaptable, technologically capable and highly self regulated workforce in the 21st century. The need to prepare students for rapid change is increasingly changing the emphasis in professional accounting education from teaching technical concepts which may quickly become obsolete to a contextual approach which foster sustainable cognitive change. This emphasis on the acquisition of generic skills has coincided, but not necessarily coincidentally, with a paradigm shift from instructivism to constructivism in the extant education literature and this in turn has scaffolded the change in emphasis by giving a theoretical basis for didactic task design.

This paper reflects on the change in emphasis in professional accounting education from the acquisition of purely discipline based knowledge to more sustainable and universal attributes considered in the context of constructivist and generative learning theories.

Specifically the paper describes the processes involved in the design of a unit in Accounting Information Systems at the University of New England and particularly the development of tasks to facilitate the acquisition of two particular generic attributes: team work and information literacy.

The unit was offered to both internal undergraduate students, defined as 18-23 years old with limited life and work experience in which to consider new ideas and concepts and external undergraduate students who were aged over 25, with significant family and work commitments. An online component was used extensively to foster a learning community characterised by peer support, investigation, collaboration and reflection and created a learning bridge between the cohorts described earlier.

Our experience suggests that the development of team work and information literacy embedded in the context of an online learning setting requires a focus on social, experiential propositional and process aspects of learning, rather then on purely cognitive learning episodes. Further the outcome of this approach is a potential graduate who has skills relevant for a career in the constantly evolving accounting profession where life long learning is a practising requirement. Nevertheless the time required for both students and lecturer to engage in a highly contextual on and offline environment can lead to the reality of the 24-by-7 student/facilitator relationship.