An overview of the major problems and disparities, and what could be done to resolve them in future years.
Amy's problems are clearly related to both the concept and delivery of the virtual environment. The simple remedy would be to deliver the course in a traditional style, but as noted in her description, the course wasn't available at any other institution in a non-virtual setting. If the course must have virtual elements, then it is crucial that clear and accessible guidance, and readily available in-person or telephone contact information (possibly 24-hour) is given to all students at the earliest opportunity. Tutor encouragement and the opening of a friendly dialogue early on may have softened Amy's frustration, but clearly the student also has a role to play in deciding whether they are up to the challenges of online learning.
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.
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.
Discussions about accessibility eventually come down to visual impairments, and although this is hardly the full extent of accessibility, it is the most powerful display of how wrongly course materials can be presented in electronic form. Justin already has his assistive technology operating in place of his sight - he has become un-disabled as a result of the technology and experience with technology that he's had over the past few years. If he was a less amicable person, he might very well align the inaccessibility of the course software to being the equivalent of able-bodied people being locked out of Tesco for no reason. Given that he is in full control of the software, which complies with internationally agreed web standards, there is then a reasonable expectation that universities make efforts to provide their information in the same agreed format. That they don't, is a known and well-documented problem, and is endemic in every layer of the institutional system. However, in the UK, US, Australia, and many other nations, there are decade-old laws which prohibit this type of behaviour, and it is only a matter of time until someone more impassioned than Justin comes along and justly declares their rights. Out of all the students involved, this case applies responsibilities to more university departments/individuals than the others, yet the responsibility goes far beyond visual impairment and screen reader usage. For all students, simple - rather than complex - information is more understandable, and where possible, should be pursued as the desirable option.
Karen's specific situation is a very infrequent occurrence, and it seems there is little that academic and support staff can do to compensate in this respect. But in a globalising education system, time differences may play an increasingly important role in judging what is possible to pursue the goals of the course without disadvantaging the students in some way. Synchronous activities are usually immensely helpful - for those who are able to turn up. For those who aren't, for whatever reason, there must be a meaningful equivalent; not just a recording of the sessions, but something with involvement entailed. Am example of this could be that rather than congregating the group into their own chat room, students are encouraged to visit some (pre-tested) open-access web chat rooms at whatever time they can manage, and then report back to the group with their results. However, apart from these content considerations, it is vitally important that the course tutors provide a cohesive role in preventing some students from being time-alienated, and that they establish a frequent communication mechanism to ensure that the long-distance branches are still content with the mechanisms.
Although more and more families are purchasing and acclimatising to computers, there is still a significant audience, of whom some children have a university aptitude, who haven't used or considered computers for educational purposes. There may be a large variety of degrees to which this detachment impacts on the education present in a virtual environment, from shifting a basic acquaintance with IVLE over to WebCT, to a complete lack of experience with the web and hyperlinking in general. Clearly the vendors of the VLE software are not in a position to provide such simplistic user support, and neither are the course tutors, who are rarely expert users with the software. The supporting role therefore comes down to the varying layers of Computing Services, and it is here too that there is often a wide gap in expertise - there are the well trained technical experts, and those with significant experience in desktop user support, but far less in the more specific field of training in usage of learning environments. If the student cannot find these mentors, then their whole learning experience will be devalued as a result of the institution choosing a virtual, rather than traditional, learning environment.