Editor Report and Comments

This report provides an overview of AIS Educator Journal (AISEJ) activities for the time period July 2019 through June 2020, which is the fiscal year during which the journal's Volume 15 contents were published.

This volume includes four scholarly articles. Two articles are Teaching Applications and two are empirical studies related to Curriculum and Pedagogy.

C. Lehmann and J. Hao (2020) provide four short teaching cases examining the application of the COSO 2013 framework. These teaching cases address the interactions among COSO components necessary to support strong internal controls. The article provides efficacy evidence supporting the cases' use in introductory AIS, auditing or advanced AIS courses. Each case includes an overview of relevant COSO 2013 elements, a case narrative, and questions for students to answer as they work the case. Instructor materials include a student version of the cases and teaching notes. The teaching notes provide recommended solutions, implementation guidance, and customization options for each case.

G. Tapis, K.S. Church, and T.Z. Webb (2020) provide an empirical case study examining the integration of a Certified Information System Auditor boot camp experience into undergraduate education. This article synthesizes the authors' experiences into a collection of best practices for implementing such a program and running the boot camp itself. Empirical results from a semester-long implementation are discussed and presented. Sample materials from the authors' implementation experiences are provided for educator adaptation purposes. The article concludes with recommendations for others implementing similar programs.

L. Weisenfeld, S. Mathiyalakan, and G. Heilman (2020) present an empirical study that collected practitioner viewpoints on the critical information technology (IT) skills needed for undergraduate accounting information systems (AIS) courses. This article extends and updates prior research on the topics included in AIS curricula. In particular, this study included an examination of IT skills segmented by the size of the firm for which each responding practitioner worked. The study finds that practitioners concur on three core IT skills (spreadsheet, word processing, and Internet research). However, the study notes divergence in practitioner opinions of which skills are most important. This divergence is related to firm size. Small firm respondents prioritize the following skills: spreadsheets, Microsoft Word, Internet research, Internet, QuickBooks, ensuring privacy, cloud computing, preventing and responding to cybercrime, software security, and managing and retaining data. Medium and large firm respondents rank the following skills as most important: spreadsheets, Internet, Internet research, ensuring privacy, Microsoft Word, preventing and responding to cybercrime, managing and retaining data, file systems, cloud computing, and business intelligence tools. This article provides timely and useful information for educators and administrators designing and revising curricula, especially as accreditors and creators of professional licensing examinations are increasingly interested in how technologies are used in accounting and business curricula.

R. Mousa (2020) provides a teaching case focused on fraud in a not-for-profit organization. In completing the case exercises, students analyze potentially fraudulent instances, detect problematic issues, calculate losses, assess problems with internal controls, and determine effective remedies to internal controls. Instructor materials include case documentation and files packaged for distribution to students, as well as teaching notes that include solutions. The teaching notes include efficacy evidence and suggestions for use in forensic accounting, fraud examination, auditing, accounting information systems, and graduate financial accounting courses.

AISEJ has published 63 peer-reviewed scholarly articles in 15 annual volumes. Table 1 shows the composition of this year's submissions according to our current call for papers categories.

One of us, Chelley Vician, is concluding her service to the AIS Educator Association (AISEA) with this volume. The other of us, Gary Schneider, would like to express his deep personal thanks to Chelley for her tireless work on the journal as editor and associate editor. The entire AISEA membership is grateful for Chelley's contributions to the association. Chelley has served the journal as Editor-in-Chief, Co-Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editor, and Reviewer. Her service on the AISEA Board has included terms as Research Co-chair and Training Chair. Chelley is an innovator who led notable changes in how the journal develops its editorial leadership team, processes papers and manages its related business processes (marketing, coordinating with journal listing services and the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registry, and managing journal finances). She reinforced the journal's devotion to developing better papers, stronger authors, more insightful reviewers, and more creative editors.

Kimberly Swanson Church will join the Editor-in-Chief team with Volume 16. She brings much experience in reporting her research, creating great teaching materials and developing cases. The journal, with the concurrence of the AISEA Board, has named Lorraine Lee to replace Gary Schneider on the team beginning with Volume 18.

The pandemic has given many of us additional teaching and administrative work, reducing the time we have available to do research, write cases, and think creatively about AIS education. During the past year, we have seen submissions drop and have had difficulty finding faculty who can devote time to reviewing papers. Our 2020 annual conference had to be canceled and our 2021 conference will be held online, factors that limited the interaction AISEA members usually have each year to discuss ideas and present early versions of their papers with each other.

As our world emerges from this global crisis, we hope to encourage more submissions, particularly in our Tools category. We are setting up processes that will allow rapid review and feedback on Tools papers. We are hopeful that increased submissions will, at some point in the not-too-distant future, allow the journal to increase its frequency of publication to two issues per year.

We are deeply grateful to the Association, its members, and the larger accounting and AIS educator constituency for the support and encouragement we have received during these tumultuous pandemic times. Our journal, like other entities, experienced delays in operations during this Volume's operating cycle. Thank you for the patience you extended to the journal, and to us as co-editors, during these unusual times.

The work of our committed and dedicated Associate Editors also deserves recognition. We wish to acknowledge the exemplary work of our Associate Editors for Volume 15: Kim Church, Del DeVries, Dawna Drum, Betsy Haywood-Sullivan, Lorraine Lee, Conni Lehmann, and Brad Schafer.

We also wish to acknowledge the strong and constructive contributions of our volunteer reviewers. Each processed submission requires at least four volunteers (Editor-in-chief, Associate Editor, and 2–3 reviewers) to read and evaluate the submission and to write developmental suggestions. Appendix A lists the names of those who reviewed one or more papers during the three years ending with Volume 15. The time and effort provided by volunteer reviewers is essential to the journal's quality and reputation. Thank you for making AISEJ a strong and recognized publication outlet for AIS education research.

Sincere thanks and special mention are also due to our intrepid editorial assistant, Abby Bensen. As a student during the pandemic period, Ms. Bensen continued to make substantial editorial contributions to our journal while simultaneously juggling the mix of suddenly online instruction. We are very grateful for her continued work with us.

Finally, we thank those of you who submitted your work to us over the past year. Without you, we would not exist. We thank each of you for making AISEJ a continued strong publication outlet for AIS education research.

Deniz Appelbaum

Montclair State University

Daniel Boylan

Purdue University Fort Wayne

Jean Ryberg Bradley

Texas State University

Susan Cockrell

Austin Peay State University

Ronald J. Daigle

Sam Houston State University

Dawna Drum

University of Western Washington

Kel-Ann Eyler

Georgia College & State Univ

Kurt Fanning

Grand Valley State University

Cynthia Frownfelter-Lohrke

Samford University

Sonia Gantman

Bentley University

Margaret (Peggy) Garnsey

Siena College

Nathan Garrett

Woodbury University

Mike Garverick

Arizona State University

Victoria Hansen

University of North Carolina Wilmington

David C. Hayes

James Madison University

David Henderson

University of Mary Washington

Amy Igou

University of Northern Iowa

Ethan Kinory

Rutgers University

Bonnie Klamm

North Dakota State University

Greg Krippel

Coastal Carolina University

Sherwood (Lane) Lambert

University of West Florida

Jie Li

Indiana University Bloomington

Cathleen McQuillen

Georgian Court University

Monica Mendoza

Stetson University

Kristian Mortenson

University of St. Thomas

Rania Mousa

University of Evansville

Pam Neely

The College at Brockport, SUNY

Ann O'Brien

University of Wisconsin – Madison

Fernando Parra

California State University, Fresno

Vasant Raval

Creighton University

Rebecca Sawyer

University of North Carolina Wilmington

Pamela Schmidt

Washburn University

Georgia Smedley

University of Missouri-Kansas City

Gregory Tapis

Missouri State University

Ryan Teeter

University of Pittsburgh

Ting (TJ) Wang

Governors State University

Marcia Watson

University of North Carolina Charlotte

Leslie Weisenfeld

Winston-Salem State University

Skip White

University of Delaware

Veronda Willis

University of Texas at Tyler

Jack Winstead

University of South Carolina Aiken

Jamey Worrell

University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB)