I was planning to take a couple of computer-oriented courses on the Coursera platform over the past couple of months but real-life intervened and I had to change my plans. However, I did keep on with An Introduction to Financial Accounting by Brian Bushee of the University of Pennsylvania.

Since I do have a fair knowledge of accounting even if I never studied it formally, I expected to have a easy ride on it. This was indeed true at the beginning as the course starts with the very basics: debit/credit, the balance sheet equation, the income statement etc. I was still glad for the opportunity to formally learn how to prepare the Statement of Cash Flows, a particular weak point on my part.

But the lectures soon went on to cover topics that are tricky even for me: the differences between the LIFO and FIFO methods of accounting for inventory, holding of marketable securities on the balance sheet, intangible assets, capitalized leases and bond issuances. It gets positively cryptic when it covers tax issues like deferred tax assets and liabilities, valuation allowances  and also accounting for stock-based compensation including stock options.

Assessment on this course is through the usual Coursera quizzes and exams. I was initially so unimpressed with the difficulty level that I posted about it on the forums. I felt that the multiple-choice questions made it too easy to guess the correct answer even if you didn’t really understand the topic. It turned out I was wrong because this was at the very beginning of the course and the difficulty curve ramps up significantly after that. Many of the quiz questions turned out to have subtly different versions so you can’t brute force your way through them and there are only two attempts per quiz anyway.

The two exams are made even harder by showing only the final score upon submission but not revealing which questions you actually got wrong. Overall, I found myself very impressed with the design and intelligence of the questions, particularly those that force you to think about how the effects of a single transaction will ripple through all of the company’s financial documents.

Another really cool feature of this course is the emphasis on studying the documents of real-world companies. This is something I’ve never really done before so it was extremely useful to see how the information presented in the disclosures directly leads to knowledge about how a company is doing and whether it is a company that is growing, stable or in decline. This is made even more interesting since the course also includes ratio analysis as a topic so real-world examples here are especially illuminating.

One of the oddest things that I had a viscerally negative reaction to initially is the use of virtual students in a virtual classroom. Basically they’re avatars with simple animations and computer voices. Professor Bushee uses them as sounding boards and to help liven up the lectures. It feels especially awkward when the students make jokes and the professor reacts to them, but we all know that Bushee wrote the jokes himself. But I actually found myself warming up to the students over time. They actually turn out to be fairly useful way to bring up questions and issues that might be discussed in a real-life classroom and I even appreciated some of the light-hearted moments they bring.

The quality of the videos is high and I guess the humour helps to keep them interesting because most of them are easily over 20 minutes long each. This is one of the courses with the most video lectures to watch that I’ve seen to date. That means that studying everything and doing all of the assignments is a significant commitment on your time. I didn’t use the forums much this time around but I did notice that Professor Bushee seems to be constantly present not only to answer questions but also to make jokes.

Overall this is an exceptionally high quality course that I would recommend to anyone, not just accounting students. Pretty much anyone who invests in stocks would benefit from it. My only suggestion for improvement might be to go a bit easier on the tortured James Bond puns.