DARLENE MCLENNAN: Ok, now I'm going to hand over to you Cathy, so thank you Cathy for joining us.
CATHY EASTE: Thank you, thank you Darlene. Thank you for those that have logged on and the opportunity to share my experiences going to America. I hope I capture enough of my experience in the time this afternoon and gauge your interest. If the sound is actually a bit loud, I actually have my phone at full volume, because I am hard of hearing. So, if that creates an echo, my apologies straight up. If we can move onto the next slide. And I will just add my own acknowledgement to the traditional custodians of the land which we are meeting and pay my respects to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. So the next slide. 
So Florida, Florida, it took me a long time to get there to start with. My original flight was delayed 13 hours, so I had to wait for a delivery of another plane. So I'm glad I didn't take off in a plane that had a suspect engine to start with. But I did eventually get there, but about probably 35 hours all up it took to get there due to the time delay and so forth. So, of course, I went a bit early so I could do a bit of touristy activities, but my argument was I had to adjust and not be tired so I can concentrate and understand and lip read and all the rest of it, so I used my disability as a reason to go earlier as well. Yes, Florida is very warm for those that do not know. Not a lot of breeze and lots and lots of storms. Alligators cross the road and I actually saw an alligator on the other side of the road. I didn't see him cross - him or her - but I did see an alligator on the other side of the road, so alligators and squirrels, quite often. Squirrels quite often I met on my walks et cetera, but very early on, as well, I started to doubt my ability to survive through the conference, because I was doubting my ability to survive without coffee. I learned very, very quickly that America, the US have no understanding of what coffee really is and those that know me, know how difficult it is for me to survive without coffee. So, next slide.
It was actually the 40th AHEAD Conference so it was actually an additional celebration with this conference, this was the 40th conference that they held, so it seemed like an opportunity to grasp that, and I did. So why did I do it? Initially because I won an award here at Griffith and I had dollars to spend and if I kept those dollars in PD, I could decide to spend those dollars on professional development however I chose and nobody could say yay or nae to it really, because it was technically my money. So it was an opportunity to attend an international conference that I'm sure would not come along again. So hence, I grabbed it and I took the opportunity and went to Florida. On screen I have a picture that's their welcome page to the AHEAD app. Now this conference here had its own app, so you could download it on your iPad, iPhone, your android phone or whatever and it's called AHEAD 2017. You can still download that app, we checked it out, and you don't have to have any sort of login to access the app, so you can download the app. The app made the conference that much more accessible for those people with disabilities, because they could have everything read aloud on their phones et cetera. It has the full programs. It has every PowerPoint from every presentation and some of those PowerPoint’s and hand-outs also have accessible versions to them. Some of them just have PowerPoint’s, but some of them have the accessible versions with them as well. That was certainly a different experience to have everything in an app. Mind you, they still had a conference booklet, an A5-sized booklet for those that are old-school and want to go through a booklet and circle whatever it is they want and take notes on a booklet, they still had those options, but you had the app as well which was very good. You could bookmark the sessions you wanted to attend, you could read up on the speakers, you could read all the presentations, PowerPoint’s before attending the presentations, as well. So it allows you to make a bit more of a choice about what it is that you wanted to attend as well, and the feedback and updates were live, so any changes, it all came through on your phone. Yeah, it was really good. I actually appreciated that myself and even though, you know, I'm pretty old-school and the conference booklet suits me as well, but you could just see the participation from people with many different disabilities that they could engage with that conference program so much better. So, next slide.
So, like I said before, you can still download that app, so if you want to have - if any of the discussion I have this afternoon about any of the sessions or something, download the app and you'll be able to find all the PowerPoint’s and sessions on there as well. So there was well over 1,000 people in attendance. It's very, very big. Much bigger than our Pathways conference and there was over 100 sessions within five days of the conference. So the conference was actually five and a half days. So, two days were preconference workshops and three days of conference. Pretty much like what we would do with the Pathways. The timing wasn't much difference and then they have a half-day session on the Saturday as well. They had dinner which actually was the first time at the 40th conference they've had dinner for many years because they found that their dinners were not very well-attended so they didn't have dinners for a while and they brought the dinner back to celebrate their 40th year, so dinner and a dance floor, that was pretty much standard to me. It's just like yep, I felt a little bit I'm with Pathways, except I'm with a lot of US people and not Australian people. The biggest thing that struck me, there was no lunch, no morning tea, no afternoon tea, so whenever there was a break, people scattered in every which direction to find food or drink or refreshments sort of thing. So that was a little bit different. It made networking I think a little bit harder and the first day after everybody disappeared and I'm thinking "Where has everybody gone? They've all gone." Nobody was left on site, because they'd all gone to venues around where the conference was not within the conference, yeah for food, so I learnt very quickly after that to ask very early in the day "Where are you going for lunch? What are we doing for lunch?" So make sure I was hooked up for lunch and morning tea sessions et cetera. They did have coffee if you labelled it that. They called it that, I didn't call it that and they did have warm cans of soft drinks and buckets of ice and that was what they called "refreshments" in breaks. That was very much a different experience, so I didn't put on weight going to a conference, so that was a new one for me as well. So, next slide.
I'm just going through some of the basic things with the conference and some of the things that I particularly liked. The conference tag, I have a picture up there of my conference tag and at the bottom of the tag there's three additional ribbons that are sticky taped, or they’ve got their sticky on the ribbon that attach to your tag. So those ribbons, they say ‘first time attendee’, ‘I can sign’, ‘international’. They have ribbons for whether you were a speaker, whether you were a committee person. So they have a whole collection. So some people will walk around with a whole collection of ribbons. Some people only have one or two ribbons et cetera attached to their conference tag. But for me, it was good because I could find people who could sign. I could find people who were there at a conference for their first time, as well, and it told ... it helped other people interact with me. "Oh, this is your first time?" So, I found that just a little bit easier, especially in an environment where I knew nobody else, because I didn't know anybody before attending. I know quite a few now, so that sort of helped that networking and integration very well, so that was pretty good. The preconference training sessions, probably not a lot different to what we have. There was a 2-day session on leadership and management. There was a 2-day session on disability awareness, really in-depth disability study sessions. There were "You're new to the field, this is what you need to know" sessions, all of that sort of thing. What I did find with the conference is nearly everything is given out prior to the conference as much as possible, whether it's on the app or so forth and everything is displayed all the way through the conference. So in the second picture on my slide is the picture of, one of the pictures of the display of access, interpreters and CART. Which CART is for real-time captioning services, they use the term CART there. So that for every session, they listed the session numbers and then they were able to stick little stickers on whether they had CART or interpreters and able to move them round. So for me that was really good, because obviously they had a lot of interpreters and a lot of CART services for the sessions, but I was able to change sessions on the spot, knowing which sessions were accessible right there and then. So that was really good. I liked that part. The inclusion at the conference was great. I couldn't fault anything in terms of their inclusion. Next slide.
Some of the biggest things when you go to a conference is what are the sessions and what are they talking about? There were a number of sessions on ESAs which are Emotional Support Animals. This is a really big thing in the US at the moment, because they seem to be swamped with ESAs that are probably the newest and growing challenge to their disability service areas and it seems to be booming. You only have to look at titles of the sessions, it's like Bunnies - explosion of ESA, Animals, are we running a campus or a zoo? and the best in show. Why they might be a little bit comical, they were actually quite serious in terms of - you know, they have big issues with animals, and there's a lot of work going on across the States on that. So when we have an increase in emotional support animals in Australia I'm sure we'll be able to tap into some of the great policies, and guidelines and groundwork that they have already. But their biggest issue is an Emotional Support Animal is a very, very easy thing to get accreditation or documentation for in America and a student may have approval that they have a guinea pig as Emotional Support Animal, but then they arrive on campus with two guinea pigs or three guinea pigs and not just one guinea pig. But they have Emotional Support Animal seems to be anything from guinea pigs to rabbits and rats and snakes and lizards and cats and dogs and chickens and I guess the sky's the limit on what sort of animal which is why they talk about having zoos on campus and not all of the Emotional Support Animals seem to just want to stay in residences. Some students want to take them whenever they go, so that becomes an issue. One example, was a student that needs to take his snake everywhere and the other students have severe phobias of snakes. So you can imagine the challenges that they have, but some of it was actually quite topical. The second biggest session I guess that was talked about and was repeated in many of the other sessions was the moving of the disability services out of a student services, welfare or health centres, whatever sort of branding that you have there. Rebranding and repositioning the disability services, and it was one of the most discussed topics. If you went to a topic on assessment, they would talk about, now if you're still living in a student welfare-type office and you were part of that, you might want to consider moving out 'cause you'll get better responses et cetera. So it was an issue that seems to be, or a trend that seems to be really taking off in the US, is that moving of the disability services out. So if we can go to the next slide.
There's many reasons behind this rebranding and a lot of it has to do with access and presenting, moving away from that medical model, because student services if you have health care, counselling, welfare, there's a sense that these students go to those when they need help with something, when they have something wrong or something that's not going correctly and they need help, they will go to those services. Whereas disability should be seen as an equity group and most other equity services whether they be for African-American support services, migrant support services, they don't sit within a student services model and probably haven't so much ever in a lot of the universities. So they see disability, they see it separately. The same as, say, a women's centre in a University sits separately and not always within student services. So, it's that pushing of that equity model of disability and seeing it as a diversity group and not a deficit group. So that was really presented really strongly in a number of sessions. The benefits, a lot of them say they get increasing interaction from faculty, they get better responses from faculties if they've moved out of student services and there's quite a number of them that have been moved out now for a year or two years or so, so they are sharing from experience. They get a lot more collaboration from academics on research. So it’s not only that interaction they're getting, they're getting included in research, et cetera and they're also starting to report better student engagement. So in the next year or so they'll have probably more in-depth statistics on that, but they're saying already that they're getting better student engagement. Students are actually coming to them to disclose their disabilities more and seeking services and support more and earlier on in their study than they were previously. So they're seeing an increase in the number of students. It's not just about a logo or a tagline. A lot of them have changed and they don't call themselves disability services, but accessibility service. We have that here in Australia as well, there has been a lot of the change, and they might keep disability in the tagline somewhere so it comes up in a search on their Web pages when you're doing a Web search, so their tagline might be formally called "disability services" or "to service the needs of student with disabilities" or whatever it is, but yeah, so the challenge that was put out by many is, are you stopping to think about what are the emotional reactions that are created by your current branding? What is your current branding and positioning within the university actually presenting to the student? If you're a part of the health service where you go when you're sick, if you're a part of the student services where they offer counselling when you need counselling because something's not going well in your life perhaps, then you're presenting that negative, broken deficit sort of model of disability. So there is an extremely strong push in America. On their discussion list recently they did a mini sort of survey on the discussion list. I know that 50% of the respondees to that survey said they were moved out of student services and a sizable of the remaining 50 said they were in the process of trying to instigate that change. So perhaps that's something we might see, perhaps not, I'm not advocating either way, I'm just sharing this was the discussion. So if we move onto the next slide.
This is one that I really liked, because here at Griffith we do all our own formatting in-house. There was a session with textbooks and textbooks will be accessible in 2018, it's a promise. There's a group of publishers that have all got together and they have a network and working on improving the accessibility of e-textbooks, all textbooks. All textbooks will have an e-textbook equivalent at some point and this is well over 200 publishers or so forth. So any publisher you can think of, whether it be Wiley or Pearsons, McGrath Hill, they are all within this group and they're all saying from 2018 their e-textbooks will work with JAWs and they acknowledge that they do not now work with JAWs and screen-reading software and this is their aim and they're working on. It's a matter of at some point in the future when you’ve finished a lot of testing they’ll click some, as he said, click a switch and things will be a lot more accessible. That means they're redoing all of their apps that use the e-textbooks use, as well. Not only then will they be more accessible for those with screen-reading software, they'll be more accessible for those with other disabilities, as well, because they'll be able to resize the font to greater degrees than you currently can, okay. So that was a huge positive and I really look forward to that. They're developing an accessibility kind of badging of their textbooks. So there may be some books from smaller publishers that might not be to the same accessibility standard as, say, some of the larger publishers or the larger quantity of textbooks et cetera. So a bit like, I don't know, what do you call it, a heart tick of approval, or a Web standard, do you meet level A or double A or Triple-A. So they've come up with some symbols and some branding. They're still to get them confirmed, but they will have a standard on that and encouragingly they're working very strongly with Vision Australia. Vision Australia was mentioned a number of times through his talk and Vision Australia, the RNIB which is the American Vision Impaired and a number of other agencies, as well, Dyslexia Association and stuff like that, so they're actually working with a number of disability organisations to increase that accessibility which as well as the higher ed organisations, as well, so that's really good and that was an extreme positive. So in 2018, hopefully for some of us that do our own work or even the amount of work in managing the outsourcing, that may be less of an issue and we'll meet greater accessibility. So, next slide.
Technology, it was a conference that didn't talk a lot about technology, but it had a few sessions on technology and talked about technology assisting disability support. So I guess there wasn't a lot of new things that struck me, SensusAccess I'm sure you have heard about. If you haven't, I'm sure it's on the ADCET website as well. That's that auto formatting and there's a lot of auto formatting, auto captioning, sort of automatic do it yourself services around a lot more. So, Sonocent was big and Sonocent being one of the major sponsors of the conference, they had a couple of sessions. Sonocent has, it's an audio note-taking software for those that do not know. Sonocent has an upgrade coming, supposedly in September, but I haven't seen it as yet so you'll be able to physically write your notes on your iPad or you'll be able to physically draw the chart or tables, especially for those in engineering and maths sort of subjects where the audio note is not necessarily equivalent to or useful if I can't draft that chart that the teacher's drafting, or that table, that diagram that the teacher's drawing on the table. So you'll be able to draw diagrams as well, not just type notes and audio record as well. Sonocent is working very hard and working very well with the higher ed providers in the States. Nearly everybody is using Sonocent. Some have Sonocent across the board and they're not doing any peer notes anymore. So yeah, if you haven't looked at Sonocent, I would encourage you to have a look at Sonocent. It is a really, really good software. Different to Australia, America has so many external captioning or CART services. Much more than what we have and I probably have about 20 of them chasing my business right now, which is okay, I'm trying a couple of them to look at how we can change things here at Griffith as well. But yes, they do have quite a lot more options so, therefore, they're seeing a lot more competition. The pricing is probably a lot better than what we have here as well. But, yeah and captioning is the next thing, if you don't have captioning they're saying you have to have captioning. So I got the sense in America that it will not be long before all of their on-line courses, every video will be captioning. Whether I can get to 12 months' time and have a look at how they're going and ask them how they're going, I think those who are not captioning every video for every course will soon be along that path and that was a topic of many sessions and how do we start financially planning for that and how do we start lobbying the universities to provide that access. So once that takes off there, I think we'll have a greater push here from our students, as well. So that's something to look for, because we will have that push here, especially once it takes off there. A lot of the universities and sessions are not providing peer note-takers anymore. So they're moving to wholly electronic options. Whether that is they're using software, little apps to take notes, record notes. Sonocent is their No.1 software that a lot of them are using, but there was a whole session that peer notetaking is being phased out if not already because their research is showing that students one, are not using the notes from peer notetaking to the level that we think they should be or to any useful level and they may not download any notes for 15 weeks. So it's obviously not working. There's a lot better tracking of whether students are accessing notes, because our notes are being provided in more an electronic format more in America so they're uploaded to a central portal and the students download. So, there was a lot of reporting on that sort of tracking and the usefulness of that, as well as research on ‘is peer notetaking enabling our students and is it actually teaching them how to take notes?’ Whereas if we provide them with the technology option, like the Sonocent, we're actually teaching them to work with notes and to take notes. Even if it's an audio note, we're teaching them to take notes rather than being a passive person in the lectures and it's actually, the research was showing the students were getting better outcomes. So that's all interesting. So the notes no more, and there’s a couple of sessions on note-taking so if you want to download the app and have a look at them, you can have a look at that detail much more. As I said, Sonocent updates are in the pipeline. So those people that are using Sonocent, hopefully this year, the updates will be there. So it's basically when you're using Sonocent on an iPad, do have a look at it on an iPad, you'll actually be able to draw within the app as well, to do your drawing, ok. There's a lot more uptake on teaching assistive tech and holding regular workshops to upskill students in assistive tech. So, they will hold a workshop on note-taking apps, hold a workshop on screen reading apps, hold a workshop on magnification apps, hold a workshop on ..., so they group the apps together and hold the workshops. There's a number of universities that regularly do that throughout the year. So, next slide.
So Portland University which was one I really liked, they have a survey that they ask all students who use assistive tech to complete before they have an assistive tech assessment. It sort of looks at targeting what sort of assistive tech support that that student needs. And they're happy to share. You can have a look. You can access that survey. It sort of makes the interview and their processes much more streamlined. It helps with statistics gathering and they can measure the students' competency in the use of technology at the beginning, and the middle and the end and that sort of thing. So their survey is quite good. We looked at it in great detail in the session that I was in on assistive tech, but it is worth having a look at it, I think on that one. They're quite happy to share the survey and then you can adapt it and put it on your own website as well. So they're a very nice bunch, over there. Next slide. Captioning, there was many sessions on captioning. Like I said, if you're not doing this you should. It was a very strong message. There was one session I went to where the School of Education and the Disabilities Services worked together on a research project and their research project was showing that they captioned all the videos and the research showed that captioning enhances the grades for all students, not just the deaf and hard of hearing students. So they put the captions on as a default, they were turned on, but the students could turn the captions off and they did a trial in the research. Some students only had the use of open or closed captions and other students also had interactive transcripts. The interactive transcripts, students received much higher grades if they had captions and interactive transcripts, because you could search the interactive transcripts better. But in one course of 80 students who participated in this study, the GPA of the non-disabled students with disabilities, their grades, their GPA increased 10 percentage points. Their GPA went from 60% to 70%. So that's a significant finding from that research. I understand they're publishing the research soon, but that's certainly worth having a look at that and to me that's very useful information in the argument for why we should be doing captioning, because it's not just for students with disabilities and it's all students that will benefit from captioning. So, next slide.
Another bit of, we all know that students don't disclose they have a disability. 70% of students who study online do not disclose they have a disability. Up to a third even after they disclose, do not register, okay. A third to 50% do not register especially if they're on-line so that's a significant number of students and statistics are important, because I think it gives weight to that. We have to be making everything we're doing accessible from the start online and we need to be doing more now for all of our students, right. Again, this comes back to the reference of moving away from student services to an independent equity type or model that is attached to education or attached to academics. Because when most Disabilities Services have moved away from student services they've attached themselves to academic fields so they go to academic committee meetings. They're connected with schools of education rather than connected to that academic admin-type role within a university. So they've moved away from administration and gone into the academic and in a nutshell that's what we're doing. We're supporting our students to achieve their academic goals, right. Not only their administrative goals. So, slide 13, next slide sorry, which is slide 14 actually.
In all of that, how's Australia doing? Well, we're faring pretty well. Australian resources were referred to quite often. Stella Young's talk was used in, and featured in, a couple of presentations. ADCET resources were referenced in another. Vision Australia was mentioned quite a few times and Ai Media was over there also as an exhibitor. For me, I think Australia is doing quite well. I don't think there was a lot of things that were mentioned that I didn't quite know about here in Australia, but hey, it was brilliant networking, it was great information. But I think Australia, we're on a par with what's happening in America in terms of how do you determine adjustments, how do you do this, and how do you do that. The biggest things was that moving the disability services, ESAs, Emotional Support Animals and captioning, I think they're probably areas where we're not quite there to the same - whether we want to go there, that's something else as well - but we're not quite at that level. But otherwise, we're doing extremely well. Next slide.
This was my favourite part of the conference, right. It was a half day. It was what they called the Unconference Workshop. I wasn't quite sure what it would be beforehand, except for it's your time to talk about the conference, right, everything you've heard on the conference and I actually really loved it. It was only 2.5 hours on Saturday morning, yep, Saturday morning, but you could pick any of the 10 sessions, whether you wanted to learn about assistive tech, on-line education, animals on campus or flexibility in attendance, best practices, leadership, documentation - that's probably another area I should mention as well, but I'll come back to that, legal issues, outreach, access, et cetera, et cetera. So they had these ten topics where they were talked about in the conference so you could go to that session and just sit and talk about ‘Well, I’ve heard about all of these animals on campus issues, how could I implement that at home in my university, because I'm having trouble with that’, or ‘I've heard about all the arguments about documentation, how can I change what I do in my university around documentation? Because maybe I think...’ - see, you sat down with people who had done that, who had implemented that and it was an open group discussion and people were in there talking about "Well, I'm doing this research on this and I did my..., this is how we did this, and we did this, this way", so to me that was really good to have the opportunity to really sit in the session and talk about that. So often I'll go to a conference and you'll hear all of this good information, but then by the time you go home you think "Oh yeah, what was that person talking about?" And "Oh yeah, I don't have the PowerPoint", so you've got to wait until that person sends you the PowerPoint if you requested it or something and you get that information. But here, you had that two and a half hours where you could really nut out and talk about how that applies to you and your university. So I found that extremely useful. I really, really liked that session. So going back to... and I think that was probably, there's the Unconference workshop where I did my best networking. The session I attended, which was on leadership management I have everybody's contact from that session and we are in contact and that was probably where I did my best ... because we were in a group who had the same goals and the same direction, what we wanted to talk about and it was great. It was great. I really, really liked that. I mentioned documentation, so I'll go back to that very quickly. American DSOs, disability services officers, whatever you want to call them, are moving away from not being as stringent with documentation as perhaps they have been in the past. So in terms of research reflecting on that, where we are putting all these micro-aggressions or barriers on people when we're requesting documentation to the nth degree on something. So they're not saying "no documentation", but they're saying we need to be a little bit more flexible, because we're creating more barriers and more burdens and more micro-aggressions upon people by the request for documentation and it's like, especially those people with disabilities from other equity groups and the feelings, like a migrant, Chinese migrant would have different cultural barriers that will prevent them from getting documentation from their GP, for example. A lot of the universities now have what they call within their own disability services, a documentation committee. It helps them to review, okay, can we still support this student without any documentation? Do we have to have documentation for this student? Can a student access services to a particular degree without documentation? So it might be for very minor adjustments they can still access stuff without documentation and not putting students through too many hoops to be able to access services. So the students can still succeed, but yes, it's not doing away with documentation, but ensuring that we're not being overly burdened, overly burdening students because of documentation requirements. There's a couple of sessions on documentation, so do have a look at them if you're interested in that. Next slide.
The other one that was very big in the group is... and like, America is very, very big so when you've got over one thousand, one and a half thousand people attending a conference and you have 4,500 and something universities or colleges in America that all offer disability services, institutions, so that's a large number of institutions offering services and, therefore, and then you add up all the disability stuff within that. It's probably very easy to have these special interest groups or SIGs and the SIGs are very prominent in the conference, as well. So they'll have sessions on their own whether it's they meet in the evenings. It might be Wednesday evening, such and such SIG is meeting here in this room and they'll have their meetings around particular disability groupings or interest groups. So it might be about the LGBTQA, it might be about ADHD or learning gaps, autism, athletics, veterans, technology, et cetera. So they have these SIGs that meet throughout the conference, as well. So the SIGs may exist outside of the conference and it might purely be online with some minimal meetings et cetera, but the annual conference they come together in a big way and they have their own sessions within that conference, as well. I found them quite interesting, but of course not sure we have the numbers here for that, but I did find the special interest groups interesting. Next slide.
The other thing, I have a photo up on this slide of one of the afternoon storms and I tell you, the afternoon storms in Florida, you can be outside for half a second and you'll be drenched, absolutely drenched. Nothing moves in these storms and I live in Queensland where I see storms quite often. They pale in comparison. But the other thing at the conference was the poster sessions. They were timetabled 2-hour session in the program, in the day where nothing else happened at that time except those poster sessions, which I found interesting because it drove a lot of people through those poster sessions, and I mean a lot of traffic through those poster sessions. Sometimes I find poster sessions tend to be difficult to get a lot of traction at some conferences in Australia, because they're just in the foyer when you're having a break or at other times and they don't gather a lot of interest. So having a set-aside time where that's all that's on and that everybody has to do it, it drove a lot of interest through those poster sessions and they did have a lot of poster sessions, so yeah, that was actually quite impressive. I picked up lots of stuff. I actually had to bring back two bags. I went with one bag, and came home with two bags. Some of it was touristy stuff, too. Yeah, but I did pick up a lot of stuff in those poster sessions. All in all it was well worth attending the conference. The networking and the connections that I have now, as well, I probably can't put a price on it. And it's worth more than just attending the conference. The conference sessions were really good. I have all of those sessions. They sit on my app on my phone forever now and hey, you can do it, too. You can download all of those sessions, as well. The next one is in New Mexico in July and yeah, they’re actually already got a call out for presentations and their presentation callout, their initial presentation callout actually closes within the next few weeks. So they're well-organised events, extremely well-organised except for food and coffee. So it is worthwhile attending, okay. But learn to survive in America without coffee. That's all. So, any questions?
DARLENE: Thank you, Cathy, that's absolutely fantastic. I'm riveted and taking 1,000 notes and I'm not even organising the next Pathway. I was glad to see that dancing was on the agenda, because that's my key to a successful Pathways conference is dancing. So if people have some questions and want to put up their hand feel free if you’ve got a good mic or you can actually write a question in the question pod. I noticed, one or two of the Pathways Committee people are online and I'm sure they'll grab you for further conversation, Cathy. One of the things I wanted to know - was there any key notes or any presentations you could recommend us for our next Pathways?
CATHY: There was a keynote presentation that I really enjoyed at this one and it was by a person with a disability who's also from the LGBTIQ and the differences in terms of how do you advocate and align yourself when you belong to multiple equity groups and she is also a Spanish speaker, as well from a Spanish-speaking background. So it's like, how do you - and I think those multiple equity groups, I think that's yeah, probably something that would be good to explore more.
DARLENE: Yep, that's fantastic. And how well attended were the Unconference Workshops?
CATHY: They were full. They had 10 sessions, they had 10 different sessions and at least 20 people in each.
DARLENE: That's fantastic. Because I was thinking of something, like I like the title Unconference, but even just putting it into practice, ‘cause I know that sense of, that frustration often you do come away from a conference, you get back to work and you're busy again and you kind of haven't kind of really thought about how you can put what you've learnt into practice, so that's fantastic. Just a little plug for one of the Webinars that ADCET had previously. We did have SensusAccess do a Webinar for us and yeah so, it is online with a link to more information there, so if people are interested in checking out some more information around Sensus they can go to the ADCET website and get more information. So I've just got another question here, did any of the presentations cover off on employment options or supports for students around employment?
CATHY: Yeah, there was a couple of sessions on employment. So yeah, I probably didn't attend many particularly about employment, but yes, there were a few sessions about employment and the challenges with employment.
DARLENE: Yep, that's fantastic. I think I've already downloaded the app. I was listening intently, but at the same time multitasking and have downloaded the app and it absolutely looks fantastic, so it might be something that I'll certainly encourage ATEND and the Pathways team to look at investigating that option for our next Pathways conference, so that would be fantastic and I really enjoyed the fantastic titles around the support animals. That gave me a giggle and you probably couldn't hear us all laughing in the background. Was there anybody in particular, because that once again it's getting a topic that we've had on the AustEd list service quite a lot, was there any particular presentation that you could recommend for us as well, even for a future Webinar to link up with America to talk about Emotional Support Animals?
CATHY: There probably is a couple of them. Oh, the one that... are we a zoo or something, that was extremely well-attended. Campus animals or a zoo. I'd have to look up the name of who presented it, I don’t have that handy.
DARLENE: No, that’s great. I think that’s kind of a topic would quite interesting for the sector. Well we haven’t had any more questions but I'm sure we've got lots of people thinking. So thank you so much Cathy. Just a quick plug before people log off. Our next Webinar is in two weeks' time on 10th October and that's going to be on a topic that people have asked for quite a lot, as well. The topic is juggling feeling capable and different, a ground theory of study at university while living with mental ill-health. That's on the 10th of October, because I know a lot of people have requested information around mental health. So we're pretty much running on time, so thank you so much Cathy for your time. It's fantastic that one of us can go off and do a PD such as this and that we can share it with the sector. So I'm so glad that you were able to do that with us Cathy and hopefully we'll keep the discussions going as we get into our, more planning around the Pathways Conference next year and thank you everybody for attending and thank you to our captioners.
CATHY: Thank you.
DARLENE: Thank you.