During the Accounting IS Big Data conference I was a member of the panel on “How does Big Data Change What We Teach?” One of the issues that was raised during the panel discussion was the following: Can every [accounting] course be a big data and analytics course?
In my opinion, we as teachers need to ask ourselves two questions:
- Does my course aim to help students understand decision making under conditions of uncertainty (does the decision making require some judgment)? For example, does the budgeting process, calculation of accruals, transfer pricing or auditing process involve some judgment? If the answer is yes, then your course is a good candidate for making it an analytics class, and you should proceed to the next question.
- Are there data (structured or unstructured - you may want to think outside the traditional data box) that we can use to remove some of this uncertainty?
