Washington University has secured a grant from the Mellon Foundation to work with a local non-profit organization named LaunchCode and a team of incarcerated coders to build an offline Learning Management System to support digital educational access in correctional environments.  

With the administrative support and guidance of the Washington University Prison Education Project and University College at Washington University, the software engineer will act as an interface between the inside developers and the external hosting environment and stakeholders. The software engineer will provide material support and guidance to the project including gathering and communicating requirements, designing and testing prototypes, and deploying and testing code. The learning management system being created will support Washington University’s prison education project courses, as well as a variety of other educational programs within the Missouri Department of Corrections.

The goal of this project is to develop a multi-functional Learning Management System that can operate without internet access through a “store and forward” architecture, to allow campus faculty to effectively manage in-prison education programs, and for incarcerated students to access course content in manner similar to that of on-campus programs. In addition to this class management functionality, the LMS will serve digital educational content of a variety of formats to students outside of core education programs.