Fresher's week (though it may be possible to enter the environment long before this) and the first week of term, traditionally a time of meeting people and adjusting to the environment. While there is no physical moving into residences, there is a move into virtuality.
A nightmare. Amy didn't post at all in the informal forums, and felt frustrated and annoyed by "idiots" and experienced users who immediately - and subconsciously - take charge of the chat rooms and attempt to exert influence. Perhaps even at this stage some moderation will be necessary to coax lurkers out and to calm the excited. At a point where a student might be expected to be excited and enthusiastic about the course and fellow students, Amy just wanted to get her head down and do things on her own.
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.
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.
This can be make or break time - Justin required a lot of technical and hand-holding support to get used to a badly conceived VLE. While he was an intermediate user of his software and hardware, the screens he was faced with didn't follow any logical order, and often didn't have consistently broken order on every page (which would have been an improvement even though it made no sense, as he could at least predict where links would appear). The Computing Support team were helpful in setting up the equipment, but they didn't have much experience with the VLE being used, and since they weren't blind, they didn't feel competent in testing pages themselves using his screen reader. Their role perhaps was more holistic, a reassurance that it was a technical rather than academic problem, and that it wasn't Justin's fault at all.
The student had fortunately completed her move and was all setup with computer and internet connection in the US. While she didn't have any notable technical problems, on reading some of the chatter posts she started to feel a little homesick, and was becoming aware of the fact that for her, the environment was very asynchronous - if she posted messages in the late evening in California, it would be equivalent to 3-4am GMT and she'd be unlikely to receive a reply until the following day, when she was usually at work until the equivalent of 1am GMT. All her own discussion threads were diluted because of the delay - and she came home to hundreds of posts per night, many of which belonged to topics which had opened, and sometimes seemingly closed, that very day.
Assuming the student has received their computer, and arranged internet access, this week will be more about orientation with the operating system / PC than with the VLE and other students. If the student hasn't received the computer, the student will be panicked and must contact the University to get Computing Support involved. The possibility of borrowing a loan laptop in the interim is likely, but eventually there will be a switch-over period to their own computer, which may have a time impact on their studies.