Susan Baxter

Video

Transcript

My name is Susan Baxter, and I've done two Open University courses. The first one was Studying Mammals, and the second one was The Human Genome and they’re both 10-point courses.

I suffer with two conditions. One is dyslexia and one is dystonia. Dystonia affects my right side and sometimes I get spasms, my right side aches and it makes me very, very tired, and so I can’t concentrate for long periods of time. With the dystonia I find that I can’t hold heavy books, because I can only use my left hand, and also turn the pages as well, that’s a bit difficult.

The second one is dyslexia, which is well known. It’s a condition that I can’t read very well, and often read ‘for’ as ‘of’ and ‘from’ as ‘for’, so I read the text with the wrong information in it.

Studying the course with the recording that I had was fantastic. With somebody else reading the text for me and describing the diagrams took a lot of stress off me so I could do several pages instead of one page, and I took it in more. I took the information in more so I understood it and could do my assignments instead of going backwards and forwards looking through the book again and again and again to get the information.

Everybody’s different how they study, and the recording helps people in different ways.

The Human Genome course was a 10-point course and I love doing science courses, especially 10-point science courses because they don’t take so long and I’d love to do more if they were available on audio recording.

As well as being an Open University student I also work for the Open University in the Disabled Students Services. In my job I come into contact with the readers every day. If it wasn’t for the volunteer readers I wouldn’t be able to study the courses that I do, and I’m really thankful for that.

End of transcript