Treffer: The effectiveness of using Python programming approach in teaching financial analytics

This study presents a learning method and challenges regarding implementing a Python programming approach in teaching financial analytics to graduate accounting students. The advent of Big Data, as well as related applications and technologies, has significantly changed the process and practice of accounting. This has led to essential changes in the construction and teaching content of accounting education. While there have been several studies examining how data analytics is embedded in the accounting curriculum, the majority of the teaching cases in accounting focus on analysis and communication with Excel as the principal tool, with very few covering the necessary steps prior to data analysis, such as extraction and data preparation. Therefore, there is an opportunity for academics to create new teaching cases to provide students with comprehensive experiences throughout the data analytics cycle, perhaps with other much needed tools such as Python. In this learning exercise, we describe our experience in developing and implementing a coding approach towards learning financial analytics for graduate accounting students as part of a data analytics curriculum. We share techniques on how to teach coding to accounting students with little or no coding experience and some of the practical challenges in the classroom. The results of implementing this module in a graduate accounting program showed that using Python programming to teach financial analytics to accounting students is effective and innovative.