Professor Christine Wiedman – L.S. Rosen Award Winner for 2020

The L.S. Rosen Award Selection Committee has unanimously selected Professor Christine Wiedman of the University of Waterloo as the recipient of the L.S. Rosen Award this year.

Professor Christine Wiedman’s excellence in teaching is clearly demonstrated at all student levels: Undergraduate, Masters and PhD.   She has consistently received outstanding evaluations, including teaching some very challenging courses that do not have a suitable text.  She is known for teaching the capstone comprehensive case course that has been instrumental for students’ successful performance on the CFEs.

Christine’s published educational material significantly exceeds the criteria – she has published nearly a dozen Ivey cases. She has taught and developed innovative materials in financial reporting, and constantly supplements her teaching with custom-designed cases. These materials are updated every year to keep the students engaged and develop their ability to apply judgment.  She has also published several articles targeted at professionals. Christine’s educational innovation in terms of unpublished course material, her contribution to Waterloo’s extensive, recent and frequent curriculum innovations and updates are significant. 

Christine has supervised 7 PhD students and served on committees of 4 more students. The rave reviews documented from past PhD students attest to her empathetic, honest, selfless and sincere mentorship over countless number of hours that have had a transformative experience for these young faculty members. 

Christine’s extensive and high-level involvement with the profession and accounting standard-setting bodies over the last 20 years is rare, important to the accounting profession, and very impressive. No less than three standard-setters wrote letters in support of her contribution to future of accounting standard-setting. 

Guylaine Duval - Université du Québec à Chicoutimi
Sandy Hilton - University of British Columbia
Amin Mawani (Chair) - York University

Using a Student‐Generated Video Project to Teach Internal Controls

This submission involves a student-generated video project to learn internal controls in an undergraduate accounting information systems course. I have been receiving student comments on end-of-course evaluation feedback indicating that internal controls is a dry topic to learn from the textbook and lecture slides. Thus, I was motivated to encourage my students to produce their videos on internal controls in order to increase their interest and better understand internal controls in their everyday life. I believe that this video learning approach is an engaging way for students to be self-directed learners and complements the written materials in the textbook. In addition, students have to comment on videos produced by their peers. I feel that this approach facilitates collaborative learning. The survey results show that most of the respondents viewed the learning experience of the video project positively. The results also indicate that the video project was effective in helping students to learn internal controls. Students also commented that they would recommend other courses to adopt video learning.

Using animated videos to teach Principles of Financial Accounting

I have implemented these methods in the “Introduction to Principles of Financial Accounting” course. The Principles of Financial Accounting is a core course taught at all business schools. Throughout my teaching experience, I have learned that students often find this course challenging. To address this, I thought of creating short animated videos to cover the topics of the course. I specifically chose animated videos after reviewing the literature regarding the methods and learning styles that the current generation of students prefer. My idea was to use animated video technology to help make financial accounting topics more appealing to students.