Public accounting firms provide a necessary and important service for rural and regional areas. However, the provision of high-quality services is hindered by a number of factors. This paper reports the findings from a large-scale survey of professional accounting firm practitioners located in rural and regional Australia, identifying factors causing concerns and tensions and quantifying their scope and importance. Prominent concerns and tensions identified include adverse effects arising from the employment market, communications technology developments and legislation such as the Corporate Law Economic Reform Program (Audit Reform and Corporate Disclosure) Act 2004 and the Financial Services Reform Act 2001.

In December 2009 the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) issued a discussion paper, ‘An Indicator Framework for Higher Education Performance Funding’, with the purpose of contributing to the development of indicators for guiding ‘compact’ negotiations between Australian universities and the government. The discussion paper makes it clear that ‘student experience’ will be an important part of the indicators and discusses the possibility that the Government will develop a new questionnaire to investigate the engagement and satisfaction of students in their first year of study. This paper contributes ideas to assist the development of such an instrument, particularly for the measurement of student engagement. We discuss problems with the predictive validity of existing instruments and argue that predictive validity may be improved by a focus on highly engaging ‘flow-type’ activities. Specifically, we investigate flow activities in the context of online learning. Our findings suggest that some of the current questions from the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE) do appear to capture flow activities. We also identify gaps in the AUSSE. Finally, we make recommendations about the inclusion of additional items that capture highly engaging, flow activities for either the AUSSE or the Government’s proposed new instrument.

This monograph presents an analysis of the assessments of SMEs located in rural and regional Australia of the services provided to them by public accountants. For the purpose of the study, and consistent with the first research monograph, ‘rural and regional’ is defined as encompassing those geographical areas outside the greater metropolitan areas of Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.

This paper reports on the development of an innovative teaching strategy: an eRoadmap. Based on the theory of conceptual mapping, the eRoadmap provides an interactive, hierarchical structure for course delivery using the readily accessible platform provided by Microsoft PowerPoint. For the student, the eRoadmap provides a self-paced learning environment which encourages student engagement while, for the teacher, it provides an environment for the development of a course framework and the integration of teaching materials from a variety of sources. Further advantages of the eRoadmap from the perspectives of both students and teachers are discussed and future directions for development, evaluation and research are outlined.

This paper reports on the development of an innovative teaching strategy: an eRoadmap. Based on the theory of conceptual mapping, the eRoadmap provides an interactive, hierarchical structure for course delivery, using the readily accessible platform provided by Microsoft PowerPoint. For the student, the eRoadmap provides a self-paced learning environment which encourages student engagement; for the teacher, it provides an environment for the development of a course framework, and the integration of teaching materials from a variety of sources. Futher advantages of the eRoadmap from the perspectives of both students and teachers are discussed, and future directions for development, evaluation and research are outlined.