Supporting students in prison – cottage industry or big
business?
Supporting students in prison has traditionally been seen as a cottage industry within the OU.
Isolated ALs work independently to provide support appropriate for their own students’ needs.
Paradoxically, the advent of the VLE has raised the profile of offender learning within the OU.
Offender learners (OU students in prisons, secure units and young offender institutions) typically
have no access to the internet and, as a consequence, no access to the VLE. If the OU is to
continue in its mission to be ‘open to all’ it must provide offender learners with a means to access
materials and activities that would otherwise be delivered via the VLE and internet.
The government has recognised that lack of internet access is restricting the ability of prisoners to
reintegrate successfully into society on release. A government-sponsored Virtual Campus, where
students have limited supervised access to the internet, is on trial in a few prisons. The OU is
working to provide course websites and AL communication facilities as part of the Virtual
Campus. An alternative course of action for some prisons is to provide a standard Moodle-based
version of course websites that can be uploaded onto the prison intranet. Centralised support for
both these projects, from the newly-formed OU Offender Learning IT Group, is transforming OU
support for offender learners from a cottage industry into big business. But most prisons are still
unable to implement Virtual Campus or Moodle solutions. This leaves ALs struggling to provide
students with the support they require to complete a course successfully.
This presentation reports on how tutors on M150, Data, Computing and Information, have
supported their students in prison since October 2008. These tutors have been part of a
COLMSCT project looking at alternative approaches to activities requiring internet access for
students in prison. At the start of the course formal interviews took place with six students in
prison, together with informal interviews with their prison education officers. Three of the students
had access to a limited version of the course website delivered via a Moodle/intranet platform.
None of the students had access to the Virtual Campus. Issues highlighted in the interviews fed
into the development of tutor packs which gave tutors both general advice and specific guidance
on TMA questions. The tutors had a dedicated forum that was used for the delivery of supportive
materials and where they could communicate with each other on matters related to M150 and
offender learners. Standard course materials were identified as essential, desirable or optional to
indicate where the emphasis on providing alternatives should lie.
But have tutors benefitted from this advice and guidance or do they prefer to provide their own
solutions to a student’s problems? Should all course teams be providing centralised support to
their ALs who have students in prison? Should support for offender learners continue as a
cottage industry or become part of a big business? To find out the answers to these questions
and provide an appropriate way forward for supporting students in prison, both tutors and
students have been asked to complete questionnaires. The questionnaire answers will be
examined during this presentation and conclusions drawn.
This presentation will be relevant to anyone with an interest in offender learning. In addition, all
course team members will be made aware of the impact that their course design decisions have
on the offender learner community.