This student originates from Italy, and English is her second language. Her course doesn't have fluent English as a requirement, but she has difficulty with more complicated sentence structures and words.
The school and course websites that Francesca is drawn toward have clear and readable language. Whenever she discovers a crucial piece of information she doesn't understand, she needs to have someone explain it - therefore contact information/links must be very clear and visible, and there should be enough relevant information anyway on the site to be able to make a snap decision, given that she will be looking at several universities and will likely make a choice on face value and easy understanding rather than real course content.
The application forms must appear simple and be easily readable. The university support systems, e.g. Registry, must be ready to be involved by phone rather than online, with an extra element of patience, as even at this early stage, prospective students can be alienated and disenfranchised with an institution they aren't even going to physically visit.
The help system of the VLE will be invaluable for this student, in getting acquainted and oriented. If it is lacking in any way, and if there isn't a readily available contact at this time to walk through some of the less obvious stages, then the student may quickly lose interest and focus. Francesca also found it difficult keeping up with the many new introduction posts, with each student adopting a slightly different tone of voice and intensity of language use; it took a lot of effort both to understand and to keep track of who had each identity.
By mid way through the semester, Francesca was having difficulty with the sheer volume of text that the students were expected to read. While she'd managed most of the core texts, it was arduous and not helped by the complex mannerisms and 'academic speak' which most of the articles felt was necessary. She hadn't delved into any secondary reading or tried to do any individual research - this wasn't because she was lacking interest in the course, but simply trying to keep up each week without overlapping with the next week's content was a major challenge.
Although I didn't feel embarrassed that English was my second language, I tried not to make it a big issue. My tutors were aware that I was from Italy but I didn't want to burden them with comments on the amount of reading, as I thought everyone else would be getting on OK, and there wasn't much I could do now that the course had started. I had enrolled at an English speaking university after all, so this probably shouldn't be seen as a criticism.
Like several students, Francesca found herself at a slight and steady disadvantage throughout the course. The initial encounters, the analysis of her progress, and her own feelings, all point to minor difficulties which don't have a huge impact but which nonetheless were ever present and weren't removed during the progress of the course.
While she didn't feel there was anything wrong with the course, an English-heavy course such as this could easily indicate in the course description how much experience might, on average, be required, serving as a guiding hand rather than an entry requirement, for prospective students to judge on their own merit. In fairness, it is the student's decision whether to embark on a course they feel they might not be ready for, but a growing number of international students entails questionning again of whether the traditional methods of flooding students' minds with the previous three decades of journal articles is counter-productive. If Francesca had really found difficulty with the reading, then it would left to the tutor to try and dissect the articles and reform them in a more simplistic way, which would devalue academic standards and very likely add bias toward the tutor's personal opinions.