Gold Award for Vlerick at the 2022 FOME Learning Design Innovation Awards

Take away the fear for finance

Finance and accounting are often seen as challenging topics, and executives with a non-financial background are often wrongfully overwhelmed by the jargon of finance professionals. But finance is actually centred around logical principles and building blocks, and the basics are relatively straightforward to grasp. It can even be exciting as it reveals a lot about the activities of an organisation. The self-paced online learning journey Vlerick developed makes the topic accessible and tangible by taking the learner through an engaging journey that includes an interactive simulation, insightful multimedia content and a number of other learning activities geared towards applying the newly acquired accounting and finance knowledge to the learner’s context.

Sophie Manigart, Professor of Corporate Finance, explains: 

“First, the participants learn to speak the language of accountants, controllers, and financial managers and develop an understanding of the fundamentals through the Finance & Accounting Simulation Tool (FAST), without getting lost in details. In this simulation, they also learn how operational and financial decisions impact an organisation’s value creation and financial risk. And they learn to recognise the levers that all managers can use to improve its financial health. In this 3-dimensional environment, participants need to engage actively by performing several tasks, based on the acquired knowledge.

Secondly, participants learn to analyse and interpret an organisation's financial statements. Using real-life cases of firms from different industries, they can really understand the story behind the financials and link them to the underlying business models. Finally, participants can apply the insights to their own context and analyse their organisation’s financial statements and situation. Short quizzes enable them to self-assess their progress, and the flexible learning approach allows them to revisit certain content if needed.”

Steve Muylle, Associate Dean Digital Learning, adds: 

“We are thrilled as this award is a great recognition of Vlerick’s continuous commitment to a learner-centred ethos that combines experiential learning and flexibility with a progressive and digitally innovative approach. Our FOME peers and the jury specifically praised how we created an engaging, accessible, and pragmatic learning journey in a challenging domain such as accounting and finance. They were particularly enthusiastic about how our gamified simulation makes financial concepts and language tangible and how these concepts can be applied to the real world. This award is also a great recognition of the continuous effort of our Learning Hub team which strives to be at the forefront of digital learning innovation.” 

Creative and impactful learning design

The FOME Learning Design Innovation Awards – which are sponsored by insendi – are a celebration of creative and impactful learning design on the insendi platform. This leading learning platform in the online and blended education space brings pedagogy to the fore to enable the richness of classroom experiences within online and blended course delivery. The awards seek submissions that demonstrate solid learning sequences which showcase a pedagogical balance to help students achieve the intended learning objectives of the course. These awards recognise intelligent, well-crafted pedagogical designs rather than technology-led solutions.

Nathalie Guesry, Senior Learning Designer at insendi, says:

“All of the submissions were of a very high standard and demonstrated exciting ways to enhance student learning. The cases show how different universities and business schools from across the world tackle the complex issue of aligning subject matter and assessment with appropriate technologies, software, and online learning strategies. Three key themes stood out across all submissions. With regards to designing for accessibility, the content in the digital classroom was carefully segmented to cater to the diverse learning needs of students. Secondly, cases focused on cultivating social learning and connection in the digital space. Finally, there was specific consideration in creating opportunities for the real-life application of knowledge.”