The Australian Government Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program-funded project, Making the Connection, is taking digital technologies, that don’t require internet access, into correctional centres to enable prisoners, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners, to enroll in a suite of pre-tertiary and undergraduate programs. A version of the University of Southern Queensland’s learning management system has been installed onto the education server of participating correctional centres. The second stage of the project will see notebook computers pre-loaded with course materials, allocated to participating prisoners. At the time of writing, the project has been deployed at eight correctional centres in Queensland and Western Australia, with negotiations underway for further rollout to Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia late in 2015 or early 2016. It is expected that the technologies and processes developed for this project will enable the delivery of higher education to other cohorts without access to reliable internet access.

Beginning in early 2014, Making the Connection project began, building on three previous projects led by USQ which trialled various digital technologies for learning in correctional centres. Most notable of these was the Office for Learning and Teaching-funded project, From Access to Success, which developed a version of USQ’s learning management system, a version of Moodle called USQ StudyDesk, which was installed onto the correctional centre education lab server.