Macquarie City Campus
The Learning Environment
Who will you learn from?
Dr Charles Koh
Teaching had always been a part of Dr. Charles Koh’s corporate activities beginning as a consultant with a world premiere accounting and consulting firm, and culminating as an executive director who sat on the Board of Directors of a regional publicly listed group of companies. University lecturing constitutes his main professional activity since 2005 when he stood down to be a non-executive director for another three years and focused on completing his doctoral research on corporate governance and finance.
During his Bachelor of Civil Engineering, Master of Business Administration, and Doctor of Business Administration studies, Charles had the privilege of learning from eminent professors and interacting with bright classmates in the most conducive learning environments at the top regional universities such as the National University of Singapore, the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales and the University of Western Australia, and one of the top US business universities, New York University. A Fellow of the Institute of Public Accountants, Australia and a Fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants, United Kingdom, he also recalled having completed while engaged on a full time professional job, one of the United Kingdom’s most rigorous professional accounting examinations. While he was a senior corporate executive, he was active in industry-academia joint seminars and wrote avidly on corporate governance issues in the press and professional journals. Charles is also a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia.
Further fostered by his recent teaching and research exposures in the universities, Charles believes that he has crystallised the essence of teaching as the process which supports the learners’ active construction and reconstruction of new knowledge individually or socially by assimilating the new knowledge with their existing notions and experience. Teaching, to Charles, is thus more than the mere communication of knowledge. Charles’ ideal accounting and finance lecturer is one who must be capable of facilitating student-centred learning of current theoretical and technical knowledge but also ethics and professional practice that so characterises and differentiates the accounting profession. More importantly, as the exemplar, the accounting and finance lecturer must also do what he or she preaches and continues to be engaged in the profession and in research to be relevant.