Ashland University’s Corrections Program started in 1964 and is one of America’s oldest higher education prison programs. Originally, students took face-2-face courses. In 2016, over 200 correctional students enrolled in online courses. The rapid growth to 1,300 students across 24 plus facilities is thanks to technology, yet poses curricular challenges.
History
Ashland University (AU) is a mid-sized, private, liberal arts institution in north-central Ohio with an enrollment of approximately 5,700 students. The University is comprised of the College of Arts & Sciences, College of Business & Economics, College of Education, College of Nursing & Health Sciences, College of Online & Adult Studies (COAS), Founders School, and Seminary. The Corrections (formerly Outreach) Program resides in AU’s Founders School. Because of this program, Ashland University is one of the longest existing correctional education institutions in the country. In 1964, Dean of Students Emeritus, Bill Mast established the program at the Ohio State Reformatory where certificate granting courses were taught face-2-face. The program expanded to various facilities and served several hundred students each year. In 2016, the COAS added online course options to the Corrections Program, which rapidly increased the student demographic to over one thousand. The speed at which this growth took place as well as the rules and regulations of the place—the prison, challenges technology support and curriculum matters to keep pace.
Opportunity
Correctional Education has been considered a key feature to rehabilitative training and provides current and future opportunities for corrections individuals to prepare for success upon release. Previously, many of the educational opportunities focused on vocational, High School graduation/GED and certificates. Higher education tended to be focused in small face-2-face learning environments. The Pell Grant when matched with current technology provided for a window of opportunity to provide online college courses. Ashland University and JPay were able to align a partnership that brought Ashland’s online courses to JPay’s Lantern Learning Management System and tablet in West Virginia, Ohio and Louisiana. The first semester started out with approximately 200 correctional online college students. This quickly grew to 1,300 students across 24 plus facilities. To facilitate correctional courses working on the LMS and tablets Ashland University added an Instructional Designer, LMS Administrator and Educational Technologist which provided opportunities to standardize and spread development to adjunct professors with a stipend.
Curricular Challenges
Change often meets resistance and the shift from the traditional classroom to online in the Corrections Program was not any different. When moving courses to distance learning, the week terms changed from 15 + 1 to 12 + 1 and course delivery went from predominantly full-time AU faculty to one with an expanded adjunct faculty pool. Department Chairs were challenged by the increase in course oversight while Deans and faculty members claimed full-time faculty workload limitations for course development, inappropriateness of online delivery of their specific content area, and inadaptability of course material format from 16 weeks to 13 weeks. Prison systems possess innate challenges to curriculum rotations, course offerings and individual plans of study due to the new incoming student populations every term, wide-range of students’ educational background and students transferring to different facilities or re-entering society at any given time. Adding the experience of AU’s Corrections program to current curriculum conversations aims to advance notions of generalists engaged in public pedagogy and intellectual leadership in non-traditional pedagogical spaces.
Teaching and Learning Challenges
The online modality offers the necessary flexibility of providing a distance-learning environment to incarcerated student populations, but due to the wireless restrictions, the students have limited access to resources. AU provides faculty members with training addressing engagement strategies as well as the audience and the prison culture. Online communication like emails or features like Discussion Boards blogs, personal pictures, surf the web for research or group work are not permissible between inmates.
A variety of challenges to teaching online correctional students surfaced with the first semester that required Ashland University to rethink the process and provide some basic education skills to aid the learner adapt to higher education. Similar to other universities, students came from varied backgrounds, ages and cultures, however, there was a large subset that only recently passed their high school equivalency tests (HSET) or GED. Were they ready to tackle college, especially in an online program? Added to this equation was the mix of older students whose technology knowledge is very dated. The challenge was compounded by unique LMS technology issues not faced by normal higher education online courses. For security reasons, there currently isn’t wireless capabilities in most facilities which requires students to sync their tablets to upload course work and download messages and graded homework from faculty. So how do we prepare faculty to teach in this environment, understand the technology benefits and challenges, and Higher Learning Commission accreditation requirements?
Growth
According to the wardens in our online education program, the most effective way to keep people from returning to prison is provide them with marketable skills. According to Davis (2016), an individual who participates in any type of correctional education program, there was a 13-percentage point reduction in their risk of being re-incarcerated and 16-percentage points for college programs. The wardens across the board talk about a change in their affective state taking place amongst the individuals enrolled in the program. The correctional students are motivated to work on their courses to the betterment of the population. According to Warden Tom (Tharp 2017), “there are less inmates engaged in idle group time and I have less population issues as the education program as expanded.” Student M from Louisiana relayed, “when I stood up for graduation and my kids saw what I accomplished after all this, they knew it was possible for them to succeed too. I told them they need to do what I’m doing now and not what I did in the past.” These words of wisdom are being expounded across almost every institution we’re teaching online courses. The Ohio Summer 2017 graduating class, every single person talked about how they now have a way to avoid coming back and a skillset they can find a job with and move on with their life. So not only is educating students and saving the taxpayers money, but it is affecting the way students interact and see the future (Pompoco, Wooldredge, Lugo, Sullivan, & Latessa, 2017).
Future
The curriculum grew from seven certificate programs to online offerings of one associate’s degree, one bachelor’s degree, and three minors. The goal to continue broadening the undergraduate degree options for AU’s Corrections Program has collective relevance because “for an increasing number of Americans, the criminal justice system plays a powerful and pervasive role in providing a formal education in what it means to be a citizen” (Justice & Meares, 2014).
As correctional institutions adjust to modern technology and connecting students to additional learning capabilities; wireless connectivity is expanding. As facilities work to secure wireless networks and we harden our new Learning Management System, the ability to provide more engaging and robust media is expanding. While this brings online education into a more asynchronous but student/faculty linked course, it requires additional training for both students and faculty. As we adjust the training and expand our curriculum, we are seeing the need to have a better understanding on how to improve the media provided to students. Which is leading students to engage their peers to sign up for classes. With this expansion, additional institutions are reaching out to partner with Ashland.
References
Davis, L., (2016). The Pendulum Swings Back: Support for Postsecondary Education in Prison. Rand Organization Blog. Retrieved from https://www.rand.org/blog/2016/12/the-pendulum-swings-back-support-for-postsecondary.html
Justice, B., Meares, T. L. (2014). How the Criminal Justice System Educates Citizens. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 651(1), 159-177. doi:10.1177/0002716213502929
Pompoco, A., Wooldredge, J., Lugo, M., Sullivan, C., Latessa, E. J., (2017). Reducing Inmate Misconduct and Prison Returns with Facility Education Programs. Criminology & Public Policy, 16(2), 515-547. doi: 10.1111/1745-9133.12290
(D. Tharp, personal communication interview with Warden Tom (Last name withheld), May 3, 2017).