Date and Time: Monday November 9th, 2026, 11.00 hour – 12.30 hour (Brussels time)
Presenters: Evelien Opdecam and Patricia Everaert
Register here.
Overview:
How can we move students from passively watching an instructor solve accounting exercises to actively learning accounting themselves? In our Financial Accounting tutorials, we redesigned the traditional tutorial by putting students—not the instructor—at the centre of the learning process. Students prepare exercises before class, work in stable teams, explain and challenge each other’s reasoning, and jointly work towards solutions, while the instructor shifts from explaining to facilitating learning.
At Ghent University, we organize team learning in a large first-year accounting course, for the tutorial sessions and provide students to choose between team learning and lecture based learning. Our findings reveal a compelling picture: team learning can increase student engagement, satisfaction and academic performance, yet not every student prefers to learn this way. When given a genuine choice, many students still opt for the familiar lecture-based format.
Objective: In this session, we share what team learning actually looks like in our accounting classroom, what worked, what did not, and what we learned along the way. Drawing on more than a decade of implementation and research, we will discuss the practical design choices, challenges and lessons that may help accounting educators who want to make tutorials more active—without assuming that one teaching method fits every student.
Keywords: team learning, large classes (> 500 students), financial accounting, tutorials, active learning
Evelien Opdecam is associate professor at Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. She teaches in the Training Program for Educators in Economics. One of her research lines focuses on team learning in higher education. She helped to introduce team learning in both financial accounting and mathematics courses at Ghent University. She published several studies on this topic in journals such as Issues in Accounting Education, Accounting Education and Research in Higher Education. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9459-3019
Patricia Everaert is full professor of accounting at Ghent University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. She teaches financial accounting to first-year students, where team learning has been organized in the tutorial sessions for more than 15 years. Together with Evelien Opdecam, she co-directs the Research Center for Accounting Education at Ghent University (www.accountingeducation.ugent.be) and has several publications. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1976-3836
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