How Can an Ex-Convict Land a Job in Tech? Here's a Way.

James Tweed has always been fascinated by the act of learning in isolation. Having started life as a maritime derivatives trader, he founded his company in 2006 to provide education for people on ships, where there was “not a lot of internet,” he says. In recent years, he discovered a new cohort of learners who also can’t get online: prisoners. Today, Coracle Online Ltd. has distributed 2,600 laptops loaded with educational software to most of Britain’s prisons, or about one for every 30 prisoners. The results are as promising as those of similar projects in the US, and may well show that digital education can have an edge when it cuts out the distraction of the internet. Isolation from those diversions, in one way, has its advantages.

For all the potential that online learning brings, with platforms like Google Classroom distributing coursework more efficiently, a constant internet connection also comes with noise. Learners who are connected to the web are more likely to struggle to stay focused on the task at hand, whether that’s due to their phones or web-connected Chromebooks. Little wonder that banning phones from classrooms can improve grades, or that high school teachers say their students now find it more exhausting to read long text without regular breaks. Recent studies now recommend that when educators teach something online, they should frequently interact with students more to keep their attention, and students must turn their cameras on to stay accountable.