Victoria Clout

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

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"