Communicating Professional Information on Accounting and Finance through the Web

 

Steve C.C. Fong, Division of Commerce

Introduction

The growth of World Wide Web (WWW) has been creating a huge global information system where it is possible to obtain any disclosed information we are looking for. Quite a number of web sites have been created under such use. So far a few web sites have been created for Hong Kong tertiary education.

AF Dragon Home Page

AF Dragon Home Page was first incorporated in 1995 under the objective of global sharing of professional Accounting and Finance information for interested public. The present URL is http://www.cityu.edu.hk/afdragon. It aims to be an on-line professional magazine about Accounting and Finance in Hong Kong and China. The main contents are illustrated as below:

What's New? highlights the recent updates of the home page.

Academic Column serves as an on-line outlet for publication of Accounting and Finance article abstracts, such as foreign investment in China and state-owned enterprise in China.

Professional Column updates various technical issues, such as amendments to the Hong Kong Inland Revenue Ordinance and Hong Kong Accounting Standards.

Financial Accounting, Auditing, Management Accounting, Taxation, Financial Management, Law, Accounting Information System, Company Secretarial Practice, and Banking pages further categorize various Accounting and Finance areas. The related sub-pages comprise hyperlinks to both Hong Kong and international related web sites, such as Hong Kong Institute of Chartered Secretaries Home Page under the Company Secretarial Practice page.

Academic Institutions for Accountancy in Hong Kong and Academic Institutions for Accountancy in the World pages hyperlink to local and international institutes that offer accountancy studies.

HKSA/ACCA Examination Matters page provides indexes of relevant articles necessary for the students to take examinations.

Career Corner links to various on-line classified posts on job advertisements.

CPA Firms page hyperlinks to various 'Big Six' and Hong Kong CPA firms that have home pages.

Professional Bodies and Other Accounting and Finance Webs hyperlink to various accounting and finance professional bodies or web sites in the world.

AF Dragon Mailing List

The mailing list is more or less an on-line collection of correspondences between webmasters and web users. In the past volumes of the mailing list, users usually enquire the following matters:

• examination matters (HKSA, ACCA, CICPA, AICPA, ASCPA);
• qualification recognition;
• exemption of examination paper;
• announcement or public information from authorities on various technical issues, such as Hong Kong tax rate, role of Hong Kong dollar in the future, various Hong Kong Accounting Standards;
• public information of professional bodies, such as Hong Kong Society of Accountants.

The chief function of the list is to record the discussion of the matters listed above. The webmasters are able to broadcast professional information and opinions to all web users and exchange opinions through electronic mail. In fact, the mailing list has formed a bidirectional forum for the webmasters and world wide web users to exchange information and opinions.

HTML Teaching Materials

On-line educational materials, which include lecture notes and lab exercises, are available through the WWW, and World Lecture Hall under University of Texas Home Page is one outstanding example. These on-line materials provide handy access points for students to review concepts that were presented in lecture. A HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language) lecture, apart from graphics, text, sound, video, animation, simulations, can contain links to other HTML documents stored in some servers around the world. It is very common in a real lecture that human tutors freely refer to their own previous explanation and other information related to it and it will increase the effectiveness of the student learning of the task. Consequently, all these elements, contents and links, must be organized following lecturers' philosophy and their style of teaching in order to satisfy the users' educational needs.

For such benefits, a set of HTML teaching materials have been adopted by Division of Commerce and used during Semester B 1995-96. The materials are about a course on Cost Accounting and Budgeting. Besides the author's teaching materials, the page also hyperlinks to related HTML teaching topics of a number of American and British universities. Using simple click and point actions, students can easily access teaching materials on and off campus.

In fact, communication between student and lecturer or student and student can be improved by sending messages via email. Furthermore, bulletin board messages enable many to many communication through posting of messages to board users. Electronic mail messages presently contain text only, but increasingly graphics, spreadsheets, images, sound, animations, executable programs, videos, or other structured objects can also be included.

In the near future, Hong Kong students and professionals will be able to assess investigations on specific contents through the distribution of seminaries via network.

Conclusion

World wide web is acting as a driving force. Since its ease of use makes the Internet accessible to people with no prior knowledge of networking, programming or even computers, it becomes more tempting for information holders, such as lecturers, to take advantage of it.

The ocean of information has to be harnessed to make it manageable and useful to users and learners. WWW network-based hypertextual capabilities are very appropriate in organizing information into appropriate hierarchies.

Computing Services Centre City University of Hong Kong ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk