E-flashcards in the autonomous learning of financial accounting.

This paper describes and review an experience in using digital flashcards (hereinafter e-flashcards) with free software ANKI in order to facilitate the autonomous learning of the student in Financial Accounting. Although the academic literature shows overall its effectiveness in learning outcomes (Golding, Wasarhaley and Fletcher, 2012) and the tool is well considered by the student (Saatz and Kienle, 2013), it is still limited the knowledge concerning its application for learning Financial Accounting. In this course special attention to the problems of valuation and accounting contained in the Spanish accounting regulations is provided. For this reason, the student must assimilate during the course a number of concepts and technical terms, not only financial but also from commercial law and tax. The open source software ANKI was used on this experience, which could be installed on different devices and operating systems. For this purpose, several flashcards decks were made available for the students. The decks were specially created for the specific study of accounting problems. Through surveys and subsequent interviews to students the usefulness of e-learning flashcards in Financial Accounting was evaluated. Even though the results of the experience were not entirely satisfactory, they show some potential to achieve their effective use in learning the subject.