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5 Tips for Getting the Most Out of Virtual Conferences I recently attended a virtual conference in accounting and finance research. Through this experience I developed some tips and I have shared a few on social media. I thought it was probably a good idea to make a record here on my Blog and then share the tips more widely. This is with the aim to start a conversation about virtual conferences. Feel free to add your own tips in the comments or continue the discussion with via social media channels including Twitter or LinkedIn. Here is the original Twitter thread where I shared some tips. Read on for my top 5 tips for virtual conferences. Tip No. 1  Arrange a social media group chat space for a usual group of academics you would sit with during a regular conference. This way you can have an active discussion with a group of academics that would usually want to talk with and discuss papers with at conference. This keeps you engaged with the conference. You are less likely to
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Zoom Lectures can be fun! For Term 2 at UNSW I decided to make the Zoom lectures fun by using themed backgrounds. I was inspired by fellow academics on Twitter, in particular Dr Scott Chadwick (of UTS) - Twitter link here . I could see Scott was having a lot of fun and his students at UTS enjoyed his Zoom background themes. I gathered as my research for backgrounds a list of all of Scott's backgrounds (see  here ). If you would like to get started I collected some of the same backgrounds (see here ). This idea of Zoom backgrounds for teaching lectures resonated with me because it looked fun. I was aware as well of some academics who tried to rope in their students into themes (remaining nameless) and that this didn't go down well. I think this is a valuable lesson as well. It guided me towards an approach of - "I enjoy backgrounds in Zoom. I'm going to have fun with this." To date students have responded very positively. Many during the "Star Wars"
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A Digital Mindset

A Digital Mindset: Let’s not close the digital box on what we have learned Who would have thought this year would turn out like this? In January this year we were blissful unaware of what was going to hit us. We had the usual excitement prepping for the start of Term 1, we had visions of walking into lectures theatres and tutorial rooms to eager to learn students. In early February this cheerful vision was starting to get turn to concern, we were hearing from students in China about, then called coronavirus, and that areas inside of China were being locked down. This became more of a concern with Australia following the USA in closing its borders to China. How would the students get here? We examined the impacts and reassessed our strategy. The first two weeks were to go online for all courses and consultation (office hours) placed online for the School of Accounting. This online access was a brief window to allow for students to arrive into Australia quickly via third party cou
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1st Zoom Lecture for ACCT1511 1B Term 2

Hi Everyone, Turn off for the "Waiting Room" option, this way students can come in to the meeting straight away, no need to click 'admit'. Turn off for the "Only authenticated users can join: Sign in to Zoom" because around 10 students couldn't do this sign in, I'm not sure why that this. This way any student can click on the link, then type in their own name themselves. You can make a person a co-host in advance - if they are going to be lecturing as well on the course. You can do this by copying in their email address into the 'co-host' box down the bottom of the "Advanced Options". See my intro slides for the first lecture  here .  I just taught the very  1st Zoom Lecture for ACCT1511 1B Term 2  this morning and it worked great! Just some tips for you - when you create the Zoom Meeting in the "Advanced Options" (see attached) for the meeting make sure you: I had about 10 students who sent me an em
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Using Security Features in ACCT1511 Term 1 Mid-Term Exam

Using Security Features in ACCT1511 Term 1 Mid-Term Exam (2020 Term 1) Let me share with you my experience from Friday of the 1B Mid-Term exam. It was run as a Moodle quiz with the following safe guards: a timer (90 mins), randomized questions, randomized answers, pre-set date/time open/close limits to the specific time (90 mins) plus a 5 min buffer, one question per page, no go-back after answer after selected and a password for access. There were 333 students who undertook this exam simultaneously and Moodle was able to handle the load, no crashing and no freezing. I learned from this experience that the password part was a bit of problem because students didn't read about the password and so after I received about 50 emails from students within 1 second of the start time I released this needed to be dropped, so I deleted that criteria. It's a good idea to monitor the assessment item and your email when the online assessment starts, then you can troubleshoot any problems a
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Moodle Quiz type Questions that can be used for an Exam: If you want to simulate the look of an exam paper in a Moodle quiz this could be done through an embedded question model called a Cloze question. Here are some guides:  https://docs.moodle.org/38/en/Embedded_Answers_(Cloze)_question_type https://wp.stolaf.edu/it/embedded-answers-cloze-questions/ https://teaching.unsw.edu.au/digital-assessment-toolkit/exemplar-7 Here is how the finished product looks: ​
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Netiquette Two slides on Netiquette - these two slide are customisable - can be used to start a conversation about behaviour expectations during online classes. Download via this link: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12366296.v1
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