AN OVERALL PICTURE ABOUT ACADEMIC LITERATURE FOCUSED ON ONLINE LEARNING IN PRISON UMA PANORÂMICA DA LITERATURA ACADÉMICA SOBRE A APRENDIZAGEM ONLINE EM CONTEXTO PRISIONAL

PhD em Ciências da Educação pela Faculdade de Ciências da Educação da Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (Santiago de Compostela/Espanha). Investigadora de Pós-Doutoramento no Centro de Investigação e Intervenção Educativas (CIIE) da Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação da Universidade do Porto (Porto/Portugal). Investigadora da RECIResearch in Education and Community Intervention – Instituto Piaget (Portugal).


INTRODUCTION
According to the European Parliament and to the European Council of 18 December 2006(2006, digital skills and learning to learn are key competencies for Lifelong Learning, that is, a basic set of knowledge, skills and attitudes, which all individuals need for personal fulfilment and development, active citizenship, social inclusion and employment. Furthermore, academic literature has been arguing that adult learning in virtual environments not only promotes skills for the use of technology, but also provides opportunities for learning and developing digital literacy (ARGHODE; BRIEGERAN; MCLEAN, 2017;SEALE;DRAFFAN;WALD, 2010). According to Pillera (2015, p. 354) […] ICTs have proved important tools for learning (learning management system, Internet / intranet access, simulation), with interesting prospects for the involvement of young people and individuals from stories of failure in learning (gamification, cooperative learning, promote reading by new devices).
In prison settings, learning conditions supported by digital resources jeopardise the right to access, use and participate in digital environments (WARSCHAUER, 2004). In addition, digital learning environments can be classified regarding the potential of inclusion -depending on the pedagogical situations for their usage and participation, the technical conditions to access, the learners' characteristics, the production of resources designed to be used in a specific context and the level of interaction, action, and reflexion that guides learning processes (MONTEIRO; LEITE, 2016). So, those who are digitally excluded, like the majority of prisoners, will be socially and economically excluded and unable to develop their potential. As mentioned by Steen & Knight (2017, p. 258), "while digital has become the 'new normal' outside, prison services are still struggling to shape and use digital space to fit their needs and enable it for the offenders inside. " In order to remove barriers to inclusive digital learning environments, and facing the urgent need for internet access and learning experiences supported by digital resources, it's very important to have an overview of learning with digital mediation in prison settings. Taking these questions into account, The article´s structure starts with the background, which justifies the theme's actuality and relevance and presents the international and European projects, as well as the world scenario concerning digital technologies in prisons. After this framework, we present the methodological options and procedures of the exploratory literature review. The results and analysis section present and interpret the findings. It is followed by the final considerations, in which the research questions are answered, limitations are listed, and clues for future research are presented.

BACKGROUND
According to the Report Review of European Prison Education Policy and the Council of Europe Recommendation (89)12 on Education in Prison (KING, 2019), politics must invest in technology and secure Internet services or alternative "Intranet" systems in prisons in order to ensure equity in the access to learning activities, and to promote digital skills -understood as one of the transversal competencies / transferable skills (essential skills in jobs and occupations such as communication or critical thinking, that can be transferred to other contexts). In a knowledge society, digital skills allow to communicate effectively in a variety of ICT influenced situations, and offer the opportunity to understand and critically evaluate digital media and media contents. In addition, the access to Information Technology and Internet is crucial in contemporary educational practices. However, access to the internet in prisons remains an A great number of prisoners have a low education level and lack Lifelong Learning key-competencies (PIKE; ADAMS, 2012). The majority of prisoners doesn't take part in training programs and reveal low motivation to participate (BROSENS; CROUX; DE DONDER, 2018;LOCKITT, 2011). The dropout rates are also high. Aiming to revert these patterns, some projects are increasing internet and ICT access as tools to promote online learning and the development of digital skills -demonstrating that it is possible to learn online inside a prison.

PROJECTS RELATED TO ONLINE EDUCATION IN PRISON
In the European context, a set of projects funded by Lifelong Learning European Programs, have been implemented in the last years. Some of the most relevant projects are listed in table 1: Developed between 2009 and 2011, the project aimed to establish and develop a dialogue among organizational and managerial staffs of prisons and teachers from educational organizations engaged in working with prisoners, on issues, dynamics and experiences related to the use of ICT and distance learning for those at risk of social exclusion -particularly prisoners -, and prisoners professionals. The project aims also to create a community of trainers able to talk continuously on these issues and to sponsor new learning opportunities and reintegration into society of people at risk of exclusion.
PEBBLE project -Prison Education: Basic skills Blended LEarning (https://epale.ec.europa.eu/en/resource-centre/content/pebble-prison-education-basic-skills-blended-e-learning) The project aimed to improve the education provided in the correctional institutions across Europe by increasing the pedagogical use of ICT in learning and by providing more opportunities for the acquisition of basic skills.

Source: Authors
Other key milestones stablished at national level in different European countries were also relevant.
Some of them are mentioned at table 2. The UK's Prisoners' Education Trust (PET) has created an on-line toolkit -which includes academic courses, mentoring programs, seminar series and reading groups -for developing a range of prisonuniversity partnerships (REYNOLDS, 2018). In 2017, PET launched the PUPiL network (prison-university partnerships in learning) to map, promote and support community -corrections partnerships fostering distance learning in prisons.

Finland
Finland was a pioneer in legislation for ICT use and provision in national prions (North Europe countries have specific legislation on this topic).

Sweden
The Net Centre -a Learning Centre and a computerized platform -is present in all Sweden prisons.

Norway
The IFI project -"Internet for inmates", in Norway, was set up as a follow-up to the European project PIPELINE, aiming to create a national network to facilitate access to the internet, considering security requirements of the prison settings (all inmates in open prisons could access the internet as a digital tool to learn, even inside their cells).

Belgic
PrisonCloud -digital in-cell provision, was a Belgian project (2016-2020) that provided minicomputers installed in cells and a digital platform.

Swiss
The service provided by BiSt, a competence centre funded by the Swiss Labour Assistance (SAH Zentralschweiz), offered a provider server equipped with useful software and offline versions of websites and web services.
Spain UNED's e-learning platform results from a partnership between the General Secretary Penitential Institutions and the UNED (National University Distance Education), that made Spain pioneer about university students in southern Europe prisons.

German
The Adult Education Association (DVV), with its online portal www.ich-will-lernen.de ["I want to learn"] provides a supplement and extension for web-based basic education in German prisons, since 2007 (EICHEN, 2014).

Source: Authors
Taken together, the projects carried out at national level, while involving several European countries, demonstrate that it is possible to develop educational projects based on digital technologies in prisons.

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY IN PRISONS' SCENARIO
The scenario in 2015 regarding digital technology in European prisons is presented at figure 1.
Countries marked in yellow had a national strategy, countries marked in red had local experiences but no national projects and countries marked in grey had no experiences. The implementation of those projects made it easier for others to develop similar initiatives, due to the recommendations they led to -not only in terms of technical and pedagogical issues, but also in terms of personal impact, including the prisoners' increased confidence in their own learning capacities. In Portugal, for example, 2013 legislation has been stressing the importance for prisoners to attend training courses with special focus in distance University Education, even though there can only be observed In the opposite position, for example, in Africa, access to digital technologies in prisons is narrow or inexistent. In Nigerian prisons, for example, internet access is totally forbidden, and the access to computers is restricted to prisoners who attend programmes from the National Open University of Nigeria (FARLEY et al., 2016). In Ethiopia, prison services are focused on security and control issues -not on prisoners' rehabilitation -and usually adopt a defensive / resistant position regarding any training in information technology, as pointed by Meseret (2018). Recently, Adebayo and Babalola (2019) have developed a study with female prisoners at Nigeria. They noticed that ICT was absent in the study areas and reported the lack of infrastructures and facilities for these training programmes. In sum, education experiences were unsubstantial and learning with digital tools is out of mind. The situation is even more serious when it is known that, in Nigerian prisons, there are high levels of illiteracy. Also, according to Joseph (2012), about 93.5% of the prisoners can't operate a computer system and about 91% don't know how to use a browser. In addition, about 92% of prisoners attested the nonavailability of a computer system. However, the inmates were interested in ICT and the introduction of a reformative program in inmates training is needed. In general, African prisons lack basic services, namely those regarding educational programmes. Facilities conditions are a huge problem, overcrowding is clearly visible, and there is no economical support to innovate in the educational area -much less in programmes supported by digital tools.
Alongside the lack of economic conditions, justice policies are extremely punitive and without any rehabilitative logic. It is possible that the punitive policies also justify the lack of literature on the subject We are supported by the idea that the fewer the restrictions of the penal system, the greater is the observance of the human rights, the levels of liberalization of legislation and of democratization of society are also greater, as well is the possibility to learn in prison with digital resources. Thus, framed on the presented world scenario and taking this idea into account, the literature review presented in the next section was developed.

METHODS
To carry out the literature review, some steps were followed. To be considered for inclusion in the review, the study's title, abstract or keywords were required to contain at least one of the keywords of each level.
In a second step, the articles' eligibility for the study followed these inclusion criteria: • articles in which education and learning were a central goal and DT was a considered factor; • studies in which the focus was the prison population; • all types of study design were considered (e.g. literature review/empirical studies, crosssectional/longitudinal, descriptive, analytic, observational or experimental/quasi-experimental); • articles published from January 1st, 2010 to December 31st, 2019; • articles written in English; • articles published in full text; • interview articles, editorials or articles published in Conference Proceedings format were not considered.
A total of 66 papers were identified at the end of this step.
After the initial search, different stages were followed to select the studies for analysis, namely: i) removing all duplicates; ii) screening and removing articles based on the title and abstract. When doubts emerged, or when there was insufficient information, the full text was retrieved for further analysis in order to make a proper judgement; iii) screening and removing articles based on full text articles selected on the previous step.
Eight duplicated articles from the two databases were removed and a full review of the remaining 58 articles' abstracts was conducted. The exclusion criteria defined for the study were applied, in order to discard the articles that: • focused on other areas of activity (for example, clinical and therapeutic areas); • used the word "prison" for other semantic purposes (for example, "society as a prison" or "the school experienced as a prison"); • although referring the terms "Technology", "Digital", "e-learning", "Online" or "Computer", were used outside of the context and meaning of the research; • focused on juvenile populations -namely juvenile delinquency -in a prison context, considering that the study is restricted to the adult prison population; • focused on professionals who work in prisons, or on students who do internships in a prison context, and not the inmates themselves.
After applying the aforementioned criteria, 38 articles were eliminated. The research focused on the remaining 20, which constituted the final corpus of analysis and were submitted to a full reading.
The process of screening and removing articles is shown in the flow of the articles' selection ( Figure   2). At this stage, all the information concerning references (author, year, article title), study design, objectives, methodological approach, target group/sample, data collection/instruments, data analysis, and results and conclusions, was organized and will be presented in the next section. No instrument was used to assess the studies' quality.

ANALYSIS AND RESULTS
Considering the temporal frame used for the articles' selection, it must be noticed that the production was higher in 2014 and 2017, with 4 articles in each year. Between 2010 and 2014, 8 articles were found.
In the last five years, the production increased, with 12 articles published, as can be seen at chart 1.

Source: Authors
Studies come from various locations all over the world: 5 from USA, 5 from Australia, 3 from UK, 2 from Norway, 2 from Portugal, and 1 from New Zealand, Spain and Turkey, respectively. Taking a look per continent, we found 9 articles from Europe, 5 from Australia and 5 from North America.
In the 20 selected papers for this study, there are no longitudinal study designs. We found a single literature review and critical analysis. Most of the studies are descriptive: 4 papers either describe a program or intervention or are a Report/Project presentation; 8 papers, besides the descriptive design, also include an interpretative component. One paper is clearly an interpretative study. One paper regards a correlational, explanatory and comparative study and another one is a comparative pre/posttest and explanatory study. Finally, 4 papers present explanatory studies that integrate the construction of theoretical models. This data and the objectives of each study are presented at table 3. Each paper is identified with a code ID that will be used throughout the paper. To determine the impact of a computer-assisted workplace credentialing program on the learning gains (in reading, language, and math) of male inmates in one Florida work-release centre (WRC), considering the effect of race, age, prior incarceration, and total sentence length. Ghosts in the machine. Incarcerated students and the Digital University

Descriptive-Interpretative
To discuss the obstacles faced by incarcerated university students for increasing eLearning in higher education.

11
Roth; Asbjørnsen; Manger (2016) The relationship between prisoners' academic self-efficacy and participation in education, previous convictions, sentence length, and portion of sentence served Correlational, explanatory and comparative study To examine Norwegian prisoners' academic self-efficacy, and ascertain the influence that current participation in education, previous convictions, sentence length, and portion of sentence served had on their academic efficacy beliefs.

12
Czerniawski (2016) A race to the bottom -prison education and the English and Welsh policy context Descriptive-Interpretative To examine prison education arguing a disjuncture between the policy rhetoric of entitlement to education in prison at the European level and the playing out of that entitlement in English and Welsh prisons.

Crabbe (2016) Education for Offenders in Prison
Descriptive-Interpretative To develop the idea that an enquiry and skillsbased approach to education, successful in schools and colleges, could be used in prison. To investigate relationships between literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving ability with characteristics of individuals within the US prison system.

Source: Authors
From a methodological point of view, the majority of papers (12 papers) used qualitative approaches, 6 were quantitative and 2 opted for mixed approaches.
Sixteen studies mentioned samples' dimension. Sample sizes varied greatly -3 papers used less than 10 prisoners; 5 papers referred samples between 10 and 100 participants; 2 papers reported 100 to 500 participants; 1 paper indicated a sample between 500 to 1000 participants; and 5 papers included more than 1000 participants.
The most used instruments for data collection are scales, tests, questionnaires or surveys (6 papers), followed by interviews, including focus groups (4 papers). Three papers collected data from data bases or official documents, and 3 resorted to mixed sources, namely (1) multi-method ethnographic approach with depth-interviews, participant observation, informal conversations and policy documents; (2) focus groups, surveys and field notes, and (3) focus groups and direct participant observation.
Regarding data analysis, 7 papers were supported on qualitative analysis (3 of them mentioned content analysis), 6 papers conducted quantitative analysis, 2 papers outlined documental analysis and 1 paper used a mixed analysis (both quantitative and qualitative). In the remaining 4 papers, data analysis is not applicable or not mentioned. This information is presented at table 4.

Source: Authors
The results and major conclusions of the papers under analysis refer to different contents, from which the following stand out: Prison Education Resources, Learning Results, Educational Staff and Cultural aspects and Policies. To support that, the papers ID's are mentioned according to the information available at table 3. Table 5 synthesizes the main results concerning the resources.

Domain Meaningful Units
Prison Education Resources ID 1 -The creation of more resources and opportunities for reading is important for everyone, especially for prisoners. ID 3 -It's necessary to access to suitable and relevant ICT in UK prisons. ID4 -Technology-enhanced distance learning is heavily restricted in such prisons. ID 10 -Incarcerated students may not receive the time, space and technology needed for equitable or comparable participation in higher education. ID 15 -Lack of ability to move to the education rooms to access the computers; it is desirable to provide course-loaded notebook computers to participating students in prison, so they can study better in their cells. ID 16 -lack of access to the Internet, in particular to the University platform; they do not have any computer equipment or technology; limited access to Internet (or Intranet).

Source: Authors
The Learning results is another topic that appears repeatedly in several articles, including aspects relating to the inmates learning achievements, the quality of the learning experience, the benefits or difficulties associated with the learning process in digital environments, and improvements in self-transformation arising from learning processes inside prison. Table 6 synthesizes the main results concerning this topic.

Domain Meaningful Units
Learning Results ID 5 -Students reported both positive and negative experiences with the devices; 86% of prisoners have been well succeeded in the course. No issues were encountered with the students' use of the technologies during the trial. ID 6 -Increasing digitization through eReaders and intranets has not been entirely successful in facilitating independent self-managing learners. ID7 -All participants experienced significant learning gains by participating in the program. ID 8 -Distance learning remains one of the most powerful transforming forces when there are challenges in the setting in which learning can occur. ID 14 -Distance education provides many opportunities with its learner-focused approach for lifelong learning due to the flexibility it offers for teaching and learning at distance.

Source: Authors
Despite the majority of the revised papers emphasize the benefits of online learning ( , which could be associated to the lack of knowledge on how to learn with digital resources, the limited access to the computer labs and the lack of support from the education officers. In sum, the less favorable learning results were found in two papers' contents underlined in this study: resources and educational staff support. Educational staff (which includes teachers, monitors or inmate tutors) is a relevant content in the revised papers. Issues regarding teacher support in learning processes, staff training and empowerment, educational staff preparation, availability, assistance, responsiveness, staff's competencies to monitor students' progress, conflict management skills and empathy, are often mentioned as can be observed at  Educational Staff ID 5 -Lack of support from the education officers. ID 8 -New systems in the prison will need to be developed to empower staff to the use of those devices. ID10 -Incarcerated students need responsive, committed and empathetic teachers, willing to support all students. ID 13 -All prison staff needs to be trained for the importance of education in prisons.
ID 16 -Lack of support, monitoring; more support from teachers in virtual classroom context are needed. ID 17 -Inmates' referred positive experiences with the instructor.

Source: Authors
The analysis allows to reinforce the importance of educational staff in the revised papers. Particular Finally, cultural aspects and policies are also a subject of concern in several revised papers. In particular, the social-political and cultural-discursive positions which impact prisoners' digital inclusion/ exclusion, including security control/restrictions/constraints. Table 8 present those concerns. Cultural aspects and Policies ID 9 -Policies with the objective of bridging the gap of digital divide have to promote all kind of general skills. ID 10 -Discussion highlights the discrepancies between official discourses of access and rehabilitation and the punitive approaches of liberal policy. ID12 -There is a disjuncture between the discourses and legislation surrounding the rights of all prisoners to education in Europe, and what is happening on the ground in English and Welsh prisons. ID 15 -The space and time planning inside the prison is always framed by demands for security, discipline and economic efficiency, sometimes to the detriment of education. ID 16 -Imprisonment must be seen from a rehabilitation point of view, rather than punishment. ID 20 -Limits of technology use for safety reasons are important.
The results show a trend to value rehabilitation policies over punitive policies (PIKE; ADAMS, 2012; BARREIRO-GEN; NOVO-CORTI, 2015;MOREIRA et al., 2017a), even though the discrepancy between discourses and practices is also pointed out (HOPKINS, 2015;CZERNIAWSKi, 2016). Security issues continue to weigh heavily on political decisions, as well on the implementation of practices that underpin the most avant-garde discourses.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
Learning experiences and research-action projects developed in prisons of different countries provide ground information that allows an analysis of congruences and discrepancies between discourses and practices. Hence the importance of making an overall picture of educational research about online learning experiences and learning supported by digital resources in prison environments.
Recalling the initial research questions, this study makes it possible to verify that the academic Currently, it is not easy to promote prison online learning activities in countries where issues related with basic needs and human rights are still the focus of concern. Even so, we recommend online learning experiences in prisons that belong to different cultural contexts, and research focused on its results.
Particularly in Europe, it seems to be of great importance to continue to finance Erasmus + projects, in order to avoid the loss of the interest and enthusiasm previously conquered. Studies carried out in the prison context will continue to demonstrate that it is possible to learn online and safely in prisons. This will contribute to the elaboration of political recommendations that break down institutional barriers, namely those related to the lack of material and human resources.
Finally, in the future, we suggest similar studies of literature review, supported in other databases, and including products other than articles published in scientific journals.