The course runs for one semester. It is critical that students do not fall too far behind one another due to technical or social difficulties as well as academic ability.
Amy didn't have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed, and the VLE didn't warn here that some of the links were PDF files. Instead of getting in touch with tutors or computing support, she concluded that the system was broken and the files didn't exist, so gave up and did some independent reading elsewhere on the web instead. As a result she wasn't able to participate in the discussions fully and felt alienated by the fact that other students seemed to have managed to download the articles. Already disheartened, she didn't post or email anyone to try to obtain a remedy until the last week when it all got too much.
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'.
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.
After a few weeks of practice and frequent guidance from Computing Support, Justin eventually felt more comfortable navigating the VLE interface. It didn't make any sense to his screen reader, but from listening to the links repeatedly he could construct a warped view in his mind of how to navigate around the different sections. He also found the forum section to be cumbersome to navigate, but again once he was accustomed to what it thought was the best layout to use, he was able to navigate quickly around it. The synchronous tasks proved impossible: the applets used for the live chat didn't even try to talk to his screen reader, and so he could type questions but couldn't receive any help/assistance in return. He phoned his tutor but agreed that by the time they'd got Computing Services involved, the chat session would be over and it may cause conflicts with other parts of the environment into trying to resolve the problem. As a result Justin missed out on around a third of the core course activities.
Karen felt more confident later in the course, because the early frenzy of posting had died down and she was able to participate in discussion of the week's reading at a more leisurely pace. However, the scheduled activities proved to be impossible: there was no time of day where she could meet with the UK students except at weekends, and some students had commitments at these times too. Even when the tutor introduced different groups for the exercises as a response, Karen felt embarrassed that other students might be put out by her time zone difference.
Tim contacted his tutor early on and Computing Support were able to get his machine up and running, and ready for the VLE, by the middle of week 2. The delay was logistical - Tim lives more than 300 miles from the University. Until this point he'd been using an open-access machine in the local public library, for which he had to book half-hourly slots in advance. He printed off most of the course materials early on (at a cost) and so was able to study offline until his computer was active. However, though this meant he was up to speed with reading, his interactions with the rest of the class and ability to explore the virtual environment and the internet were constrained, and he found he had a lot of social and discursive catching up to do in the second part of this semester.