Making Education Fun! The Marketing of Advanced Topics by Multimedia

During the recent decades, there is an increasing concern on accounting fraud. According to the report by Federal Bureau of Investigation, from 2007 to 2011, there has been an increasing 12.8% cases reported on eight categories of accounting fraud, amongst which are money laundering and corporate fraud. The situation has attracted global interest, in virtue of some highly publicized cases, including the Enron and WorldCom. This resulted in the growing demand to comprise ethical behavior and decision-making courses into the syllabus of university degree programs. For universities without accounting major, this however implies that fraud education will need to be delivered within general management courses. This fosters the need to design fraud education syllabus that can meet the requirements of the economy but attract the attention of students who do not specialize in this area. The current research used a multimedia, movie, as a marketing tool to market this advanced accounting topic to freshman majoring in tourism and hospitality. More than three hundred freshman undergraduates are included. The majority of students hold a positive perception on the use of movie to learn accounting. It is found to improve their understanding and is more effective than reading textbooks alone. Based on the technology acceptance model (TAM), three hypotheses are established and a regression equation is developed that explains the relation between perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of movie on the technology acceptance of using movie as an education tool in accounting.