Learner Reviews & Feedback for Introduction to Financial Accounting by University of Pennsylvania

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I am an italian graphic designer, photographer and illustrator. So I'm not exactly the right "accounting-type" of person that can successfully complete an english course on this topic.

Nonetheless professor Bushee managed to create a course that even I could follow, understand and complete. I was quite depressed that I had to attend this course to build the Business Foundation Specialization, but I did it. I am very impressed by this and this experience boosted incredibly my self-confidence. I also realized some basic but very important facts about finance that will for sure protect my business and money in the years to come.

The course is not easy, but has been made easier and enjoyable as much as possibile. The cartoon guys and girls that randomly appears in the video lessons seemed quite obnoxious in the beginning, but they play an important role in expressing questions and doubts. They also make everything a little more light and funny, which is good. So I somewhat loved them in the end.

I found just two weak points:

1. the math that is used here (and in all US accounting, I realized) is different than the one used in Italy and I think in all Europe. Basically here there are no "-" and "+". A subtraction is represented by a number in brackets like (250). It took me some time and effort to understand this and I still find it very unusual.

2. the attached pdfs could really be improved by some graphics and by the addition of a list of categories and operations for the double-entry. Now you have to scavenge the web to find them, not all sites list all of them and as the course goes on things become more and more complex…

I anyway recommend this course.

Although the instructor mentioned that extra problems or explanations can be found in textbooks, I wish there were more problem sets I could work on in Coursera. Otherwise, the course was very well organized and understandable. The most difficult part for me was just trying to memorize or at least be aware of what T-accounts were available. There would be no way one would know what accounts to put particular transactions without having a good overview of the existing sets of accounts. All the accounts for the Relic Spotter Case Study were on a downloadable pdf, but during the lecture videos, I had to keep bringing up that sheet to remember what accounts were there. Other difficulties I had were the revenue and expense recognition criteria, especially for transactions for goods or cash that was delivered in the future.

This was a good class! It was painful, but good. I think the inclusion of the 2 case studies was vastly helpful. The professor was great at explaining concepts and did a thorough job of trying to explain accounting concepts in an online format. It was great to be able to combine the online instruction with the case studies to get practical experience. I think it would have been 5 star if there were more "homework" type problems as the exams felt challenging with so little practice, especially on cash flow statements. Also, I'm not sure if this can be done, but it would have been great to have explanations on how answers were derived for test questions if you missed them.

This is a great course! I really enjoyed the professor and his teaching style, and found the slides to be immensely helpful when reviewing. Overall, this is a very approachable and enjoyable course that will help you get your bearings about what's going on in accounting. He teaches T accounts at the very beginning, which I'm told by my CPA friends is a sign of a really good professor.

The only reason I didn't mark this as a five star course is because some the quiz questions looked at the information at a slightly angle than was presented during the lectures and I would have appreciated some additional sample or practice questions to make those connections.

Excellent introduction to a tough subject. The instructor is excellent, anticipates questions in a fun way, and makes it easy to pay attention. Only reason it's not 5 stars is that I found the second part of final exam surprisingly difficult and had a hard time looping back to the course material to understand why I was getting the answers wrong. I still don't know, but the discussion groups are quite active and the instructor participates, so there area a lot of pluses.

It's a lot to take in over a short period of time when you have other obligations. I recommend making time to review the week 3 material well before taking the exam.

A very good & creative teaching method adopted - animated students, gave a good feel of virtual class and moreover Prof. Brian's way of teaching was nice with his in depth knowledge of the subject.

Only thing that can be improved on overall Coursera exams & quiz is: after the student has passed the exam, he / she should have an option to see the detailed answers of the questions which he attempted wrong, because a student might not try again & again after he has passed the test & moreover he could gauge the answer at all. So it will be really helpful if he gets to know the detailed answer instead of just saying "Incorrect / Correct".

A lot of material is covered in this course. Would help a ton if the subjects covered were given twice as much time to comprehend and really nail down the different facets. As it is there are tons of new concepts taught each week. Pretty intense. The condensed nature of this course is not really the teacher's fault, just a victim of the format.

That said, Brian Bushee is clearly a great teacher who does an excellent job of walking you through the principles and practices in accounting. I also greatly appreciated his sense of humor throughout the course!

I found this course engaging and interesting for the majority of the time. I have struggled with previous courses (especially ones with accounting or finance) where the jump between weeks are so great it's difficult to keep up, but Professor Bushee did an excellent job addressing more difficult topics with the 'virtual students'.

I struggled a bit in week 2 but eventually came through after some additional self-study. With that being said, I can now confidently say I can read financial reports issued by public corporations.

The teacher is absolutely terrific. I really loved how he thinks out questions and is very thorough. He is amazing. However, I felt like the statement of cash flow part was a little confusing. Also, I felt like there could have been more examples during the lesson like what was in the final exam where it actually walked through fixing mistakes and knowing how to detect errors. I struggled with understanding those questions because I don't remember going through many examples like that during the lessons.

I enjoyed the hands on examples. For someone like me with absolutely zero background in accounting, the examples provided a good way to truly grasp the concepts. While I don't anticipate actively using any accounting methods in my own career, I believe this course gave me an intro on how to gauge a company's growth and performance based on some standard financial metrics. I'll admit the starting was hard but by the end of the course, I was able to understand more and more of the material.

A straightforward intro course on the rather intimidating subject of reading financial statements and accrual accounting. You will come away from this with better ability to speak financial language and be able to understand to a degree how financials work in businesses. It gives you the fundamentals to then learn further about analysis of business. If you plan to start your own business, this definitely gives a good portrait or the importance of responsible accounting practices.

The professor was very funny and his virtual students kept me interested when I started to fall asleep from all of the formulas. I have a good high level understanding of accounting now, but if I was asked specific questions about formulas we covered I would not know them off the top of my head. This is more because there were so many of them rather than the professor not explaining them well enough. However, I have the PDF notes from each week so I can always pull those up!

An awesome course, as an economist I handle the basics of corporate finance and investments, however, felt like reinforcing the finance foundations and couldn't find a better course than introduction to financial accounting to do that.

Professor Bushee designed this course flawlessly as it is intuitive to understand what he's trying to explain in each session. Also he's got a great sense of humor which makes a quantitative course like this a lot less boring.

Congratulations!!

Overall the course was really good. Given the subject, I was expecting the videos to be dry and boring. But Professor Brian manages to keep the sessions light and funny. There is a good mix of theory and practical examples using the case studies. This helped me to solidify my knowledge and apply it against real use cases. I also found the tests at the end of each week to be adequately challenging ie not too easy and not too hard. Great job putting up this course.

Thank you, teacher Brian J Bushee

You have been a great teacher, very humorous, always try to lessen the boredom for us while learning this difficult subject. However, the Final exam part 2 didn't have explanation/reference for right or wrong answers. It is crucially important for us to get to understand Financial Accounting in depth. I hope this opinion is noticed so other students can have better understanding learning this course with you!

Very good course for an introduction to financial accounting.

Most of the basics are covered from the professor in a course of 4 weeks.

The homework/quiz for each week was really good. Only drawback is that you cannot contact the professor. For any questions you have to post in the forum and hope that someone will reply.

Recommended for anyone who feels that needs to revise the basics of Financial Accounting quickly or start from scratch!

The course material is very well designed to suit the needs of anyone who does not come from a finance background. I would recommend this course to anyone who is just about to begin his journey on the path of financial accounting. Professor Bushee explains all the elementary concepts very effectively.

I faced a lot of server related issues while pursuing this course. Hopefully that will not affect any other courses I take in the future.

Everything in this course was new to me, since I've never had anything to do with accounting before; in the beginning it was pretty comprehensible, all new terminology was explained,; but in week 4 I felt completely lost- I wasn't sure what we were working on anymore. Anyways, I just wanted to discover if accounting would be something that would interest me- I don't think so now :) But I did enjoy learning new things.

Best,

Anna