Isenberg’s Jeremiah Bentley Receives Innovations in Management Accounting Education Award

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Jeremiah Bentley, associate professor in the Isenberg School of Management, and his accounting students recently received the Jim Bulloch Award for Innovations in Management Accounting Education for their grant-funded conversion project to enable free, open access course materials.

The award by the American Accounting Association and the Institute of Management Accountants comes with a monetary prize that will be used to fund printed copies of the open access materials for future generations of students.

Bentley’s project began several years ago when he started the process of converting his Accounting 331 (Cost Accounting) course to follow the open education model. The process included dropping the $350 textbook that had been used before Bentley came to UMass Amherst and converting to free, open access materials. However, the lack of quality materials made this conversion challenging. With the help of a UMass Amherst Libraries Open Education Initiative grant, Bentley worked with his students to create their own materials making them an accessible alternative to high-priced textbooks.   

The finished product is publicly available on the UMass Amherst ScholarWorks page and has been downloaded by over 150 institutions.