The first of its kind in South Africa, the platform enables accounting students across the country greater access to learning accounting in their mother tongue, and aims to boost the number of black graduates entering the profession.
According to the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA), transformation in the profession remains sluggish. Despite numerous initiatives and bursary programmes to boost black membership, only 24% of chartered accountants living in SA are black.
Associate professor, Jacqui Kew at the UCT College of Accounting says the initiative, in the form of a 10-minute video provides short and concise explanations of specific concepts within the areas of financial skills, financial reporting and management accounting.
"These are all key foundational concepts necessary to understand both basic and more advanced business and accounting concepts," Kew says.
"What makes the project so unique is that the videos are available in Xhosa and Zulu, as well as English, to help students whose mother tongue is not English master complex financial terminology," she says.
Should additional funding become available, Kew says videos in other languages, such as Sotho are already planned.
"Language barriers are a huge obstacle to many students," Kew says. She says this is a contributing factor to why so many non-English-speaking students, studying in the field of accountancy, fail to complete degrees.
According to Kew, for many students from disadvantaged backgrounds, learning the language of business is like learning a new language.
"For many students, there is a double translation process that needs to happen. They need to understand accounting concepts at the same time as interpreting nuances in the English language. If English is not their first language this makes understanding the accounting concept even more difficult," she says.
In trying to address this educational challenge, the college decided on a video platform, a medium many young people identify with and one that allows students to learn at their own pace. Other video platform benefits include using the tool in any geographical location for multiple years. The platform also allows research into the efficacy of both online and multi-lingual learning, which will enable the College to refine its offering and potentially roll-out the concept to other subject areas.
The videos were made possible with funding from Fasset, as well as production expertise from GetSmarter, online education pioneers in South Africa. The material was scripted and presented by UCT lecturers and translated into Xhosa and Zulu by accounting lecturers from the Walter Sisulu University in the Eastern Cape and an academic from Wits University in Johannesburg.
"Education in South Africa should not be in a competitive space, we need to collaborate in order to meet the challenges we are facing," says Fasset's Tania Lee.
"We are delighted to collaborate with UCT and GetSmarter in this way and enable this initiative that will play a key role in addressing the shortage of black accounting professionals in South Africa," she says.
Rob Paddock, Chief Academic Officer at GetSmarter says: "The Learn Accounting website is a very exciting step forward for us, not only because it gave us the opportunity to work closely with the incredibly talented faculty at UCT's College of Accounting, but also because these high-quality learning resources are now available for free to everyone."
"This is an innovative approach to learning accounting concepts and opens up the business world to more South Africans. It is a rich partnership between a government institution, a private technology provider and a university, pulling together our strengths in an effort to show what we can achieve when we are working together," Kew says.
Visit Learn Accounting to view the new platform, open to anyone who is interested in learning more about accounting and finance.
