Tuition providers endorse ACCA MENASA Colombo Conference

ACCA’s MENASA Learning Providers’ Conference 2011 was held on 20 and 21 July at Cinnamon Grand Colombo, with the aim of supporting ACCA’s learning providers and giving them the unique opportunity to discuss the challenges and opportunities they currently face in the market, share their practices and help them develop action plans to enhance tuition support to students.

Delegates from Bahrain, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Dubai, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Maldives, Nepal, Oman, Pakistan and Sri Lanka participated in the sessions to address common challenges in the region.

ACCA tuition providers from Sri Lanka who took part in the conference responded with enthusiasm and endorsed the conference as one that gave them guidance on all the important aspects that were both relevant and important to tuition providers.

Speaking on the many useful insights and initiatives gained from the conference, Managing Director Jeevith Shakespear of Mercury Institute, ACCA’s platinum status tuition provider, said: “Although it was the first time that we took part in this conference, it was a great learning experience for us. The interactive sessions with the trainers drew out the problems, suggestions and ideas from the participants and we understood how other tuition providers in different markets tackled their problems and overcame them in a successful manner.

“The facilitators also gave their thoughts and analysis of these situations and provided many valuable insights that were very relevant to our markets and also focused on better methods of teaching and how we could best market the study courses. We hope that ACCA will have many more conferences of this nature in the future as it gives us, the tuition providers, important guidelines on how to nurture and create members and students that are sought after by employers.”

Managing Director Kumanan of K Aims (ABET Institute of Management Studies), another ACCA tuition provider in Colombo, said: “The discussions on best practices for teaching, assessment methodologies and the examiner feedback received on student exam performance was very useful, as well as the forums on identifying challenges and methods of how to initiate solutions to help improve exam performance.”

Priscila Francis who heads Tianshi International Commerce Institute, ACCA’s tuition provider in Kandy, also endorsed these thoughts by stating that the conference provided them many useful tips on how to motivate their students to get the best performance out of them and gave guidance to their lecturers on teaching methods which would lead to a high success rate in passing examinations.

Cosmopolitan College of Business & Technology (CCBT), one of the newest tuition providers of ACCA, explained that the conference provided them the chance to interact with both examiners and top tutors from BPP and Kaplan, which was a great opportunity for them.

Resha Relvan, a lecturer of the institute, said: “It gave an in depth insight on ACCA’s global objectives and helped us to understand the kind of acceptance that ACCA had worldwide and on how we could best use these facts to market ACCA to Sri Lankan students, to make them understand the benefits they could gain from obtaining the ACCA qualification. This was very important to us and it gave us the confidence that we had made the right choice in being appointed as one of the new tuition providers of ACCA and helped us understand the benefits of being an approved learning partner and the resources and support available to us.”

Giving her thoughts on the feedback received from the tuition providers, Country Manager for ACCA Sri Lanka Aruni Rajakarier stated: “We are very pleased about the high level of enthusiasm and interaction demonstrated by the participants. It was a very rewarding experience to come together with so many of our strategic partners and strategise on how we can improve accountancy education in the MENASA (Middle East, North Africa and South Asia) region.”