Creating Success in Academics for Recovery Students
Sober College Online Grows its' offerings to include ICDS courses

Sober College™, well known for its’ work in treating young adults recovering from drug and alcohol addiction, has partnered with the Institute for Chemical Dependency Studies (ICDS) (the Publisher of Recovery Today) to provide an avenue of education for California professionals seeking to become licensed addiction counselors or wanting to access Continuing Education Units (CEU’s). This partnership is developed through Sober College Online, which is the online educational division of Sober College and has been providing online education to students for the past four years. It’s a viable partnership of two organizations that brings definable expertise to the table. ICDS has an unparalleled curriculum and Sober College Online brings the technology and the experience of teaching recovery related content to individuals in or interested in treatment. As Sober College™ begins to make its imprint in the professional education world with ICDS; we thought it important to share some of our success as an effort to allow the readers of Recovery Today to get to know us.

Elements of success for Sober College™ in delivering quality education to its’ residential students are complex, numerous and very integrated within a treatment context. These elements include low student to teacher ratio which allows students to get more attention and instruction than they would in a traditional classroom, a curriculum that incorporates proven skills for success (i.e. time management , goal setting, etc.), ongoing assessment and work that is individualized, customized and driven by an educational/clinical team approach. For students that need a more intensive structure, these elements are worth considering. For the majority of the recovering population, the following four factors create positive and lasting educational impact:

1. An Asynchronous Learning Environment. It is well known that recovering persons suffer from low self-esteem, low patience thresholds and can easily become overwhelmed. This experience is exacerbated in early recovery by difficulties in asking for assistance and self-acknowledging when feeling overwhelmed. Asynchronous learning environments are found in the online learning environment and are a student-centered approach that delivers content without the constraints of time and place. Sober College Online delivers all of it’s’ college credit courses in this format. Students have the opportunity to work at their own pace and can complete coursework in weeks or months.

Additionally, this can combat the feeling of being overwhelmed by carrying larger course loads. In traditional settings, a full course load can have a student enrolled in three to five courses at once. For students that easily frustrate, the simple idea of carrying three to five courses can be a recipe for disaster. With asynchronous learning, a student can take one course at a time and complete it faster, which allows him/her the ability to accumulate more credits in a shorter period of time. It is possible to complete a single course in 2-6 weeks; with an average of one course a month, a student can complete 12 courses or receive 36 credits in one year’s time. Traditional four-year bachelor’s degrees are completed after 120 credits or 30 credits per year. The asynchronous method creates more credits and less anxiety which is ideal for the recovering student.

2. The Instructor as Counselor. With students in recovery, there is nothing more essential than the relationship with their instructor. In addition to their core academic knowledge base, instructors require a higher level of understanding and, a critical working knowledge of recovering students. This working knowledge incorporates two critical skills of empathy and interpretation.

Through Sober College Online, we have found that our students produce content and writings that are extremely expressive, revealing and, at times, graphic. After all, students draw on their own personal experiences for assignments. To the uninformed or un-empathetic instructor, stories of abuse or criminal misconduct could be alarming and could impact their willingness to work diligently with the student. Additionally, the proper response and solicitation of further material can move the student to a higher level of academic performance.

Instructors require interpretation, or core counseling skills, to be effective with this population. Not that an instructor should be a therapist; however, to be effective with this population, the various roadblocks for the student must be understood and addressed. In the process of revealing oneself through the academic process, the student may be “stuck” by the pure thought of having to re-hash an uncomfortable previous experience. It is incumbent upon the instructor to have a correct interpretation of the student’s roadblock and move them in a positive direction.

3. The Technology of Relevant Content. Across the board, education and the delivery of content are changing and the possibilities are abundant. For students in recovery with short attention spans, the traditional learning method of lecture driven courses is not always the most effective. Students have a number of different styles of learning and they should all be incorporated. The appropriate type of curriculum needed, as well as the delivery of content needs to be examined and adopted. Assignments tailored to a course can be changed to create a unique opportunity for learning.

Sober College Online delivers asynchronous courses with unique learning assignments that are relevant to the student and provide content that is enticing to them. In our first course, “The History of Drugs and Alcohol in Music”, which is an introductory history course, the students watch documentary films on music groups like Metallica, Aerosmith, Eric Clapton and Billy Holiday. Our Communications 101 course requires attendance at Twelve-step meetings and gives college credit for this activity. Our newest course in development, Psychology 202: “A Study of Emotional Intelligence and Its’ Relevance to the Field of Psychology”, has the students participate in such activities as surfing, trapeze and individual and group therapy to get a real-life understanding of emotional intelligence. The academic endeavor is to relate their experience to the field of psychology.

4. Create a Personalized Experience. It seems counterintuitive that an online delivery system could create a personalized experience; however, this is just the case. The relationship between the student and the instructor, via the computer, is a one-to-one experience and can be uniquely tailored to each student. While the instructor is managing numbers of students, their feedback and comments are directed to an individual student. This process of individuation can be technology driven or can come from the work of the professor.

To take it a step further, personalized and face-to-face instruction can go hand-in-hand with the personalized online experience. Academic coaches and teachers are centerpiece to the Sober College™ experience. So in addition to having an online instructor, the student has an academic coach/teacher by their side, which is important because students in recovery need a high level of individualized attention.

In summary, these four keys to success can be adopted to any learning environment that is working with newly recovering students. Based on a high level of insecurity and inability to manage high levels of stress, the institution’s response to recovering students is critical to their ability to succeed in an academic setting. Online approaches combined with traditional teaching methods can also have a positive impact.

For more information about Sober College go to www.sobercollegeonline.com.