The evolution of the accounting profession requires new and innovative ways to teach aspects of accounting that may have previously received little exposure. One of these that is of growing importance is data visualization. Our guests – PICPA member Michael Ozlanski, associate professor and accounting department chair for Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pa., and Suzanne Seymoure, associate professor of accounting at North Central College in Naperville, Ill. – have made data visualization engaging for their students and received an honor from the AICPA for their efforts. We sat with them to learn more about their approach as well as the award they received.

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By: Bill Hayes, Pennsylvania CPA Journal Managing Editor

 

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Podcast Transcript

With the CPA profession constantly evolving, that means that new aspects need to be taught in the classroom. One of those new aspects is the concept of data visualization. The challenge, as is the case with any subject, is finding a way to make that subject engaging for students in the classroom, whether that means in person or virtual. My guests today were able to find a way to make the topic of data visualization engaging, to the tune of winning a prestigious award from the AICPA. Here to talk about their honor, Michael Ozlanski, associate professor of accounting and accounting department chair for Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, and Suzanne Seymoure, associate professor of accounting at North Central College in Naperville, Ill.

You recently won the George Krull/Grant Thornton 2021 Teaching Innovation Award from the AICPA. The award was for a project – or a case – you gave your students titled “Divvying Up Data: A Data Visualization Case.” Can you tell us a little bit about the case and what it entailed?

[Seymoure] I was at a conference three or four years ago, and we were talking about how to integrate data analytics into the classroom across the entire accounting curriculum. And one of the concepts that we were talking about was where to find data sets, because creating data sets is oftentimes the most difficult piece of the puzzle with creating a data analytics case. They mentioned government sites and things like that, and I happened to be living across the street at the time from a Divvy Bike Station in Chicago. I googled the term “Divvy data” and, sure enough, I had multiple years’ worth of data there available for every ride happening in the city. So, I took that, and the first semester I literally just had my students create an infographic from it. Each year, I add a little more onto it. It got to the point that it's at today, where we are building on the case and having students look at the data that's in the file that Divvy uploads on a regular basis, and then analyzing the information related to how it's being used by individuals in the city.

You work at different universities, so how did the case come together? How did you come to work on it together, and how was the idea hatched?

[Ozlanski] Our common connection, besides just being really passionate about accounting education and developing future generations of accounting professionals, is actually that we're both Virginia Tech graduates. That's where we both got our PhD. We're actually ships passing in the night at Virginia Tech. So, Suzanne left the summer that I arrived on campus. But we both have a passion for teaching and researching in the auditing field, so we both attend the same conferences. It was at one of these conferences that we were actually introduced by a mutual friend who was also a Hokie. She was in between us in terms of our progression through the program.

She was really great at brokering an introduction. We didn't even realize at that point, but Suzanne and I were working on a case about helping students learn how to audit inventory. Just by this conversation, we learned that we were doing something independently and something quite similar. We just started collaborating on that. We actually were able to take that project from an idea through a publication. It was during one of those meetings that Suzanne brought up this idea of this data visualization case, and I said, "Oh, this is pretty cool. Tell me more about it." That's how this mutual collaboration started. I should just say that, as with any great partnership, Suzanne's strengths complement my weaknesses and vice versa. It's a really great team to be able to work together.

How would you say your students took to the case? Did they seem to be more engaged in it than maybe the standard in-class teaching? What was it like?

[Seymoure] I've embedded this in an AIS class, which can oftentimes be a little drier than other accounting classes and not what they necessarily were thinking about when they got into accounting. Giving them a hands-on activity that they can dig into and really sink their teeth into learning something that they've never seen before has been really engaging for students. I will say they seemed overwhelmed initially, and that was part of the reason with the case that we created, what we called a guidebook, that essentially walks them through the process of creating the data visualizations, that we didn't have initially.

Would you say there's anything you learned from working on the case, whether it be about data visualization itself or interactive teaching and how it helps students learn?

[Seymoure] I learned a lot about Tableau. Much like Mike, when I went through undergrad, this was not something that we talked about, not something that our computers could handle. Up until I actually started using Tableau in the classroom, I think I'd looked at a dashboard and that was about all I had done with Tableau. I know far more about Tableau than I did three years ago, and data visualizations. I just keep wanting to dig in more and more every day when I'm working and teaching in the classroom.

Can you tell us about how the case gets put up for an award? Do you enter it yourselves or is it the school or even the students? Once you're up for the award, did you think you had a chance to win when this all started? What do you think?

[Ozlanski] As we're working on projects, whether it's this one or any other academic project, we'll often submit them for consideration for conferences. There's two main conferences that projects like this get submitted to. So, we submitted them this summer, something called the Conference on Teaching and Learning in Accounting, and also to the Effective Learning Strategies Forum at the American Accounting Association's annual meeting. In each case, when those proposals go in, they're evaluated by a committee and a decision is made, whether or not they'll be on the program or not. We're just really grateful that the committee for each of those programs selected us to be included. It's a really neat way for us to share what we're doing. Also, it's a really great way for us to get feedback from other accounting professors on how we can just make our cases and our projects even better.

What we did is we submitted it to the Effective Learning Strategies Forum, and if you get accepted to that, you also then get invited to apply and submit your project to the AICPA Teaching Innovations Award. That's exactly what we did. It's a separate submission process to go up for the AICPA Teaching Innovations Award, and there's a separate committee that includes academics and practitioners. We had a few weeks to assemble all of the materials. We even had to make our own little mini-podcast with a visualization, which was quite fun. It was a bit nerve-racking and a bit intense. We knew that this was a pretty cool project, we knew that it was unique and interesting, but we're also highly aware of the fact that there's so many other great accounting professors out there who are doing really high-quality work.

We would go to the conferences each year and see the projects that were selected and they're all just super high-quality. So, we were really cautiously optimistic when we hit that submit button. But we were incredibly honored, incredibly humbled when we were selected. I remember getting the email. It was a Thursday night. I was out with some friends and I immediately ran out into the parking lot and called Suzanne to make sure that she knew to check her email. It was raining quite heavily that night, but I'm standing in the parking lot. It's just this great, great memory that we'll have, calling Suzanne to tell her to check her email.

You may have addressed this slightly, but why did you choose data visualization as a topic? As we look at maybe data visualization in general, why do you think it's important to the industry?

[Seymoure] At the time I went to the conference where we were talking about integrating it into all of our classes, it became very, very clear that we all needed to be integrating it more because that's the way the profession was headed. We didn't have it in nearly enough classes at that point. That was why I did it. I knew my students needed more hands-on with data visualizations and data analytics. We needed to figure out what to do to do that. This conference was helping figure out how we could integrate it at the principal's level all the way to the senior classes because it's that important.

I feel like I'm talking to an Oscar winner or something here, asking them about their next roles or upcoming things, but I guess do you have plans to follow this up with new cases, or will this be something you'll be continuing to teach in the classroom in future semesters? What's that look like?

[Ozlanski] I guess I'd note that we each did get these nice, shiny plaques from the AICPA. They're not a statue holding a 10-key or a calculator or something like that. But we do have something quite nice and shiny to put on our bookcases. So, Suzanne is continuing to use this case in her classes. I actually have an outstanding colleague here at Susquehanna, and she was so kind to help us pilot the case in her classes. I know that she was really excited about it, and she was going to continue to use it, so maybe if I can just on a personal note to give a shout out to Angie for her help throughout this process. The case itself is currently under the peer review process at an accounting pedagogy journal for potential publication, so we're really excited about that: another opportunity to maybe share this out with other accounting professors.

But we are thinking about how we could potentially modify the case and enhance it. Suzanne mentioned that it's a large data file, and just to put some context around what that means is there's about 3.6 million rows of data in just the data for 2018, which is what the focus of the case was. We're aware that students have unequal access to technology, so some students have really great laptops, some students have laptops that are maybe a little slower. We've noticed that there's variation in terms of the computing power.

We're thinking about how we could maybe slice up the data files a little bit for instances in which students need access to a smaller data file. Still something that they can't analyze themselves just through Excel, but we're thinking about how we can do that. In terms of the next project, we're always thinking about what that next great idea is going to be to improve accounting education. We're always having those side conversations when we're working together. We can't tell you what that new project will be today, but we hope that you continue to stay tuned for what that might be in the future.