The student experience: their impression of the course, the medium, and the support mechanisms with respect to their individual situation.
It met all my expectations - half the students seemed to rocket off and really engage with the course, and the other half said nothing and seemed to flounder in the dark. The tutor made a couple of posts generally encouraging people to talk more, but nothing personal came through and I couldn't be bothered with some of the stupid things that were being said and done. By the time I had problems downloading files I was disillusioned with the learning experience and didn't really care how I got on or what I scored.
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.
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.
I had fun! It was tough in the first few weeks but I'm used to that kind of dfficulty with most websites anyway - what was most annoying was not the stupid layout of the web page, but the fact that I was eager to get into discussions and put down all my thoughts straight away; it was a shame that I had to jump through hoops to get to such a simple stage. After a while though I could work my way around the maze with my eyes closed (pun intended!) and really enjoyed the course. If it had been a traditional offline course, I would have had to get all the texts translated into Braille at huge cost, then it can be time consuming to read them because I prefer to read electronically now, and you can't leave meaningful bookmarks or highlight sections of Braille easily.. There were a couple of articles which had been scanned straight in and not converted into text, so I had to get the tutor to re-do them properly for me, which added a bit of extra time but nothing too bad. I do wonder whether other students might have benefitted from having the text versions though, even just to be able to highlight, copy and paste bits for reference later. But anyway, a good experience, and we'll all get better at it as we learn together.
While I felt comfortable using the web software and keeping up with the reading, my physical environment proved to be the real issue. Even for a virtual course there were some unexpected real life problems to try and resolve, like the need for sleep! Especially with the real time chats that I missed out on, I felt I was being excluded by my own situation - even though I had alternatives to go to, the whole group had been broken up because of my needs.
Although I was delayed in getting into the course, I knew this was likely because I didn't have my own computer and had chosen an online course. I printed off the notes etc. quite early on and so was able to keep track of the course even when disconnected. This allowed me to raise discussions and comment later in the course, although I did find that some of the points had already been raised and the topics seemed dead.