Since 2004, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology has carried out this program with the aim of strengthening the international competitiveness of Japan and of cultivating highly trained professionals by offering focused financial support to excellent educational projects, selected from the competitive environment of private and public universities by a third party, which enrich and develop the educational content and teaching methods in professional graduate school programs, law schools being a prime example.

　The following is an outline of the project which has been selected that the Waseda University Graduate School of Accountancy will undertake.

In the first year, 2003, of the “Program for Supporting Distinctive University Education (Distinctive GP)”, the project titled “A Modern Liberal Arts Education that Strives for Practical Knowledge” and undertaken by Waseda’s Open Education Center was selected.

【Research Department Name】
　Waseda University Graduate School of Accountancy (Japanese Only)

【Project Name】
　“Framework for a Collaborative Auditing Education System”

【Project Outline】

　Until now, the education and training of auditing professionals through actual auditing experience, particularly “problem identification and problem solving”, has been overlooked. This project seeks to greatly improve the effectiveness of practical auditing education by creating a network of students and professionals, realized through the combination of a virtual auditing educational system and a volunteer group of practicing certified public accountants.

Through a two-way communication system established via the network, the students and professionals would play the roles of client and auditor for each other in a virtual auditing session. Students would thus acquire the skills needed for problem identification and problem solving. This sort of skill development aims to provide the kind of on the job training acquired within corporations but which is foreign to graduate programs. By commoditizing the experiences of the current certified public accountants volunteering for this project, and by effectively using IT, this project will attempt to expand the horizons of what is possible for practical education in graduate school programs and – as much as possible – make a content model for skill development.

Furthermore, a system will be built where it will be possible to store all the shared knowledge and various shared practical experiences gained from the collaboration of students, teachers and other contributors. It will be a database of accounting information which makes full use of the “individually small but collectively great” power of the network.

【For Inquiries】
　Office of the Graduate School of Accountancy　Tel:+81-3-3208-8540