This student has difficulty reading medium to long pieces of text due to mild dyslexia. As a result, in the past she has shied away from literature and arts courses even though she is most interested in this field.
She found it very difficult to cope with the array of common yet distinct pieces of information - the same course in different universities will contain only subtly different - yet crucially important - information. Different courses in the same institution may read nearly the same with minor differences - and it's possible that, due to the student becoming overtired with reading, the student may even end up signing up for the wrong course because the descriptions are too similar or vague.
Fiona applied online, misread several of the questions, and was confronted with error messages which made even less sense. The forms didn't seem to be well organised and were too long to keep track of your position easily. There was also no indication of how many questions were left to answer, meaning it was very tiring to keep a positive outlook. Eventually she managed to fill in everything correctly, but this probably wouldn't have been helped with a paper version.
Fiona was used to using Word, which autocorrected most of her spelling and typing mistakes, so she had assumed that the VLE would do the same. It was only when there were some off-putting comments made about not understanding her posts that she realised none of it made any sense. At first she spent time composing her messages in Word and then pasting them over, before another student pointed out the spellcheck feature in the VLE. It was a laborious process, however, trying to make each sentence sound OK when she didn't really know what it should sound like to begin with, and so several times she got lost in the flow of conversation and gave up.
Although this student was organised and had tried to put strategies in place to cope, such as printing off all the articles at the start of the course and colour coding them, the sheer weight of text quickly took its toll. The different fonts used from one article to the other made it difficult to readjust in the same session and Fiona quickly found she had to split reading into more sessions than she'd anticipated. Combined with the running commentary from the rest of the students, she managed to complete her reading for most of the weeks in time, with an adequate understanding, but wasn't able to follow up with any other reading and was mentally exhausted by the end of semester. While Fiona's dyslexia isn't something which can be easily anticipated with a heavy reading course, the structure of the course could be such that it is broken up several times by less intense weeks of reading where other forms of activity take precedence. This might offer a chance to 'recover'.
I don't feel like I understood everything as well as the other students, because I took twice as long to read the articles and sometimes had to reread them several times. The language used was very difficult and the quality of print wasn't great. It would've been more helpful if the files were in text format rather than scanned images, so I could have used my assistive software to read some sentences out loud and help me understand difficult words by offering alternatives. It was good to be able to read other people's comments throughout the week rather than waiting until we got to the tutorial and felt like we were on the spot and unprepared though.
Despite the challenging amount of reading material, Fiona ended up only having a slight disadvantage compared to other students. She already had coping strategies worked out from prior knowledge of her disability, and so was able to adapt them quickly and catch up without significant problems. As a very bright student, it's possible that the disadvantage might have been made void by her performance in assessments.
Her overperforming academic ability is satisfying for Fiona, but it may point to a problem of non-recognition: if she has always performed well, then her disadvantage due to dyslexia may never be compensated for, and she may never actually achieve the true results that her academic brain deserves. With an average of one dyslexic student per class of 30, tutors should seriously consider the demands placed on excess and complex reading, and whether there are alternative ways in which the learning experience can be equally realised. Fiona's difficulties are best described as floundering, and can be easily averted if there is a clear, amenable contact who is ready to explain the environment, help out with simple problems, and perhaps more importantly, is available to diminish divisions appearing between different students as a result of quick or slow take-up of the environment.