Disabled Students’ Allowance
Koala for Disabled Students’ Allowance
Koala is designed to support executive functioning, particularly where disability-related barriers affect task initiation, working memory, prioritisation, planning and completing academic work.
Students
Your licence code comes from whoever bought it. Enter it and your licence starts.
Assessors and support teams
What Koala supports, in functional terms, and how to see it for yourself.
What Koala supports
The demand Koala takes off a student
Most study tools assume the hard part is remembering what to do. Often it is not. The hard part is working out what a piece of work involves, holding that in mind, deciding what comes first and getting started.
Finding and interpreting the work
An assignment brief, a reading list and a deadline come back as sized steps, rather than one large title a student has to decode before they can begin.
Organising it
Steps are sized in minutes and planned across the days the student actually has, never more hours than they said they had.
Moving through it
One next thing at a time. Whatever does not get done is carried into the next day overnight, so nothing has to be re-planned by hand.
Koala reduces the executive-function demands involved in finding, interpreting, organising and moving through work. It is not a general productivity tracker, and there is no system for the student to build or maintain.
For assessors
Where Koala fits in a needs assessment
Koala is recommended where the barrier is executive functioning rather than access to information. These are the functional areas it is built around.
Task initiation
A large piece of work is already reduced to one sized next step, so starting does not depend on breaking it down first.
Working memory
The plan is held outside the student’s head. Nothing depends on remembering what was decided last week.
Prioritisation
Koala orders the work from deadlines and what is already committed, so the student is not ranking everything themselves each morning.
Planning larger pieces of work
A dissertation or a term of assignments is spread across real days, rather than sitting as one deadline months away.
Identifying manageable next steps
Steps are sized against the hours the student said they have, so a next step is one they can finish in a sitting.
Moving from planning into action
The day arrives already made. The student opens Koala and starts, rather than planning before they can work.
For students
How your licence reaches you
- The purchasing organisation supplies a unique licence code. That is usually your DSA supplier or your university.
- No personal payment method is required for a valid DSA-funded licence.
- Your licence activates when the code is entered, and the licence period starts from that point.
For suppliers
Ordering Koala
Place an order using our DSA order form. Once a valid order and PO/reference are verified, Koala issues the invoice and supplies the individual licence code(s). Orders are normally fulfilled within 1 working day.
Support
For ordering, licence or activation support, contact support@koalaforwork.com.