Online Learning Environments enriched with audiovisual technologies and its impact on the construction of virtual communities in Higher Education in prison context

Access to education and training has been a growing concern to different international organizations, and the concern for socially vulnerable groups at risk of exclusion, such as the prison population, in particular, has been increasingly evident. In this context, and assuming that education and training in prisons must have a similar degree of demand as regular educational institutions, Online Education, mediated by digital platforms, is an opportunity for inmates to acquire knowledge and skills. In fact, the integration of digital platforms in the context of imprisonment can be a very appropriate tool to revitalize the educational experience. It is precisely the creation of learning environments enriched with audiovisual technologies that we intend to analyse, describing their impact on the creation and development of a virtual learning community, based on the qualitative analysis of the perceptions and narratives of seventeen students attending Higher Education in prisons and having as reference the pedagogical models developed by Garrison et al. (2000) and Moreira (2017). The results show that the design of the online environment anchored in these models and in the use of audiovisual technologies can have very positive effects in the creation and development of virtual learning communities in higher education in prison context.