How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love E-learning: The Pedagogics of the Flying Accounting University

The Flying Accounting University is dedicated to further develop the social and ecological dimension of accounting. It is a pure “online-university”. It has no homeland. Its channel is e-learning. How does the channel fit to the mission? Which implications has the channel on the subject? What is our method?

This session asks for our basic pedagogic concept. Does the old paradigm of Rousseau still hold true, that in a dynamic society, it is senseless to teach eternal values, because the context changes permanently? Rousseau then recommended to focus on METHOD, in order to unlash the individual potential.

It turned out that, in our times, a dynamic society became a “must-have” – without numeric growth, our societies are already in crisis. They must be dynamic in permanence. Eternal growth is the new normal. These societies require dynamic individuals.

How to educate these individuals, how to create them? Economisation of education, quantification, digitalisation and now also e-learning are the means of this process. In former times, this process was called “alienisation” – a distance is created where it shouldn´t be.

Rousseau’s theory of change seems to be perverted into the ideology of economic growth.

At the same time, we already know that this cannot go on endlessly. This paradox has been formulated like this: “our way of accounting seems to be unchangeable, while the nature, onto which our accounting is applied, is already in turmoil” – precisely, as a result of our accounting practice.

Is e-learning simply a method to prolongue an economic practice, which is already dying? What is our relation to this tool?