Stanford Mobile Inquiry-based Learning Environment

Students using the Stanford Mobile Inquiry-based Learning Environment in Ghana

Stanford Mobile Inquiry-based Learning Environment (SMILE) is a mobile learning management software and pedagogical model that introduces an innovative approach to students' education. It is designed to push higher-order learning skills such as applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. Instead of promoting a passive, one-way lecture learning, SMILE engages students in an active learning process by encouraging them to ask, share, answer and evaluate their own questions. This renders students to be active agents of their learning and hones their creativity, critical thinking, and collaborating skills. Teachers play more of the role of a “coach,” or “facilitator”. The software generates transparent real-time learning analytics so teachers can better understand each student's learning journey, and students acquire deeper insight regarding their own interests and skills. This prepares students to understand their giftings and passions. SMILE is valuable for aiding the learning process in remote, poverty-stricken, under-served countries, particularly for cases where teachers are scarce.

While the primary objective of SMILE is to enhance students’ questioning abilities and encourage greater student-centric practices in classrooms, and enable a low-cost mobile wireless learning environment. the greater vision of SMILE is to raise students who are global citizens, and whose curiosity and compassion for worldwide issues drives them to be innovative problem-solvers.

History

SMILE was first developed with the help of Seeds of Empowerment (Seeds), a global non-profit 501(c)(3) organization founded in 2009 by Dr. Paul Kim. Since 2009, the NGO has helped pilot studies around the world to test the software, especially in under-served countries such as South Africa, Ghana and Tanzania.

A major contribution to the initial technical design of SMILE can be attributed to a research study led by Dr. Paul Kim, along with his research assistants at Stanford University. The research study called PSILAN (PocketSchool Interactive Learning Network) investigated a portable ad-hoc network solution that enabled a multi-user interactive learning environment in areas where resources such as electricity or access to Internet is limited. This research was part of multiple projects affiliated with Stanford's major interdisciplinary research program named Programmable Open Mobile Internet supported by National Science Foundation.

The latest developments of SMILE have been made by GSE-IT at the Graduate School of Education of Stanford University and partnering organizations such as Edify.org. The license of trademarks, software, hardware, and its technical design remains with the Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) at Stanford University.

SMILE has been listed as one of the most innovative tools for the schools of tomorrow by Education Commission, chaired by Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister of United Kingdom, in its 2016 report named "Learning Generation Report".

How it works

A sample question developed using SMILE

The SMILE application is easily adopted and used. Pilot cases have manifested students being able to pick up functionality of SMILE within 10 minutes while teachers manage to facilitate smoothly within 2 rounds of SMILE sessions. SMILE is composed of two main applications: a mobile-based question application for students, along with a management system for teachers. The software allows students to create open-ended or multiple-choice questions on mobile phones during class to share with their classmates and teacher. The classroom management software allows students to share, respond, and rate questions on criteria such as creativity or depth of analysis. These applications can communicate via either a local ad hoc network or the Internet. The local ad hoc network (SMILE Ad-hoc), shown in Fig. 1, is for developing regions without any type of network; the Internet version (SMILE Global) is for areas with mobile networks linked to the Internet. SMILE Ad-hoc enables students to engage in SMILE activities and exchange inquiries with peers in their classrooms or their own school. SMILE Global enables students around the world to exchange their inquiries regardless of their location. Both SMILE Ad-hoc and SMILE Global allow students to incorporate multimedia components in their questions: SMILE Ad-hoc uses images, and SMILE Global uses images, audio, and video. 3

The software allows students to generate, share, and evaluate multimedia-rich questions. Students are asked to submit their questions to the server management application, which then collects all the students’ questions and sends them back to the student mobile-based application so that each student can answer his or her peers’ questions. Teachers can also enter questions to test information. While responding to their peers’ questions, students are also asked to rate the questions on a scale of 1(poor) -5 (excellent). A predetermined rating criteria is shown below. Teachers and students can also develop their own suitable standards for rating questions.

Question ratings

The instrument is designed to identify performance variations. It enables organizers to define five different levels of question quality. For example:

Question Difficulty	Description
Category 1	Students respond with minimum cognition involving simple recollections of learnt material or simple arithmetic calculations
Category 2	Students conduct a simple analysis on question types and qualities (e.g., asking questions about questions) or solve problems with simple reasoning. These questions are designed to assess if students can recognize and make distinctions between low quality questions and higher-order thinking questions.
Category 3	Students solve given problems with an intermediate level of cognition and analysis.
Category 4	Students solve given problems with a deeper level of analysis and reasoning.
Category 5	Students ignore distracting information and extract only accurate information to make a necessary inference. Students must formulate their own rational equation to arrive at a conclusion.

The data management software gathers these responses, records the time students take to respond, and saves this data for the teacher to analyze. Students are also able to view the results in regards to how everyone's question was rated and whether they answered questions correctly.

As facilitators of this system, teachers have the ability to choose the “mode of learning” which describes the different forms or activities of questioning that students engage in. The following is a list of the various operating modes.

Operating modes

SMILE has five operating modes. The facilitator chooses the mode for each activity.

Mode	Description (replaced description with what was on the smile website)
Exam Mode	In exam mode, only group organizers can create questions. Rating and commenting are disabled. The session remains closed (questions are not visible) until you enter solve mode. Results are hidden until shown.
Brainstorming Mode	A session in which participants can raise big questions to be shared, commented, and rated for further critical discussions. Leaders often ask the participants to come up with questions that reflect on changing trends, emerging technologies, or social phenomena that might have a significant influence on how we do business today and tomorrow.
Open to Closed-ended Mode	A quiz in which students first create open-ended questions, and then turn these questions into multiple-choice questions by adding answer choices. The students then answer and rate each other's questions. The organizer controls when students can create questions, and when they can answer questions.
Student-Paced Mode	A quiz in which students first create their own questions, and then answer and rate each other's questions. Students can create and answer questions at the same time.
Organizer-Paced Mode	A quiz in which students first create their own questions, and then answer and rate each other's questions. The organizer controls when students can create questions, and when they can answer questions.

Different learning modes allow for variety and fosters a learning environment of both teamwork and competition. Teachers can promote a classroom environment that is either collaborative, competitive, or both, depending on what they deem will motivate their students more. When creating questions in teams, the learning environment calls for collaboration. When ranking each team's questions, the activity turns into a competitive game. Additionally, generating multiple choice questions is a critical facet of this learning model because it leads students to do thorough research to find the right answer and distractors. Verifying that distractors are not feasible answers to the question also reinforces the student's learning of the material.5

In lieu of test scores, the ratings of the questions can be used to assess learning outcomes. Analyzing a student's ability to rate other students's questions can be used to determine the student's level of critical thinking skills. The process of rating questions from their peers invokes students to analyze the content in a deeper fashion.

Overall, SMILE affords multiple benefits to teachers and students: it creates a highly interactive learning environment, engages learners in evaluating and analyzing their own learning, promotes inquiry and critical reasoning, and allows students to synthesize acquired concepts. It also allows students to generate, share, and evaluate multimedia-rich inquiries. Learning becomes fun and research-oriented. Given its mobile platform, students can learn, study, and inquire anytime and anywhere. 4

Practice

SMILE has been implemented in over 30 countries, mostly in underserved regions. Some countries include Tanzania, SMILE is intended for a wide range of educational settings. Not only is SMILE content-agnostic, but the pedagogical model behind SMILE is to encourage students to make critical inquiries, research, and investigate the answers instead of being told the answers by their teachers. Schools that have successfully implemented SMILE are incorporating it into their curriculum two to three times a week. To address the rapidly advancing technological era, SMILE effectively utilizes mobiles and "flips" the standardized way of teaching and learning ("It's time to flip the classroom" - Dr. Paul Kim)

SMILE in Elementary Classrooms

Elementary students can use SMILE to create questions which are then solved and rated by peers. The entire process is controlled and monitored by a teacher using an activity management application.

In the learning process, students proceed through stages of Make Your Question, where students create multiple-choice questions. Solve Questions aggregates the questions and sends them back to students to solve and rate on a five-point scale. See Results allows students to see their score.

The teacher has multiple features at his or her disposal. The Activity Flow window allows the teacher to activate the various stages of the activity. The Student Status window displays the current status of each student. The Scoreboard displays each student's responses. The Question Status window displays metadata about the question. The Question window displays the question itself and its predetermined correct answer. The Top Scorers window displays which student achieved the highest score and which question received the highest ratings. The Save Questions button allows the teacher to save data from a given exercise to the server.

SMILE in Math Classrooms

Math classes in Argentina and Indonesia have implemented SMILE as a learning model. In a typical setting, students go through several phases of learning. They are: Introduction and device exploration, Prompt for problems, Student grouping and generating questions, Question generation, Question solving, Result review, Reflection, and Repetition & enrichment. Song, Kim, and Karimi describe this in their 2012 paper, Inquiry-based Learning Environment Using Mobile Devices in Math Classroom. After familiarizing themselves with the mobile devices, students were asked to create challenging questions that “even their teachers would not be able to solve.” Students were also be grouped in teams to generate questions where each member would attempt to also solve and verify their answers to their own questions. In addition to using their mobiles, students took pictures of supplementary figures or graphics that they drew to illustrate the question. At this time, facilitators would walk around to guide the students and help them discern what makes a good question. Afterwards, students solved their peers’ questions and rated them according to quality. Facilitators would monitor these activities in real-time and allow students to review the correct answer and student/group ranking of the questions. After reviewing, students were asked to explain their process of generating math questions and how they solved them.

SMILE in Participatory Action Research

Community- and organization-based research studies, which are conducted by directly involving local participants or indigenous researchers mainly for transforming social inequalities, have been described as action research (AR), participatory research (PR), participatory action research (PAR), or community based participatory research (CBPR) 6 PAR aids to equip disempowered or marginalized communities often in rural or developing countries with influential strategies of change. In the healthcare sector, PAR has especially been used to collect data, inquire, and reflect to improve health and welfare. In such a field, SMILE serves to be an advanced communication technologies leveraging crowd-sourcing for collective inquiries. It has been used for connecting communities of health practitioners or indigenous members of communities to exchange inquiries and solutions to cause a paradigm shift within the participating community by enabling participants to become active agents in their own education, practice, and empowerment process. Integrating SMILE stimulates participants to think beyond the facts and instead, think critically, formulate inquiries and generate plausible solutions. 6 A typical SMILE session involves participants making questions regarding healthcare topics most prevalent and of interest to themselves. Questions could include captured images from references, physical environments, or audios and videos of patients. SMILE then collects all inquiries to redistribute them for participants to answer. Once participants respond, they are asked to rank their peers’ questions and also present the rationale behind their own questions. Facilitators observe and analyze the quality of the questions according to relevancy and clarity. In the end, a review of correctly answered questions, average rating, and number of questions generated is shown.

The whole process enables the participants to think beyond simple health-relevant facts. Also, SMILE leverages the collective construction of inquiries, leading to a more reliable and accurate depiction of the circumstances as a whole. They are able to distinguish facts from opinions, verify sources, analyze cause and effect, determine faulty generalizations, and avoid oversimplification. By empowering the participants to co-evaluate and reflect on their phenomena, the external researcher's role is simply to facilitate the conversations. Examining the questions and answer choices generated by participants help researchers uncover important insights.

Technology

SMILE Plug on Marvell hardware

SMILE Plug creates an ad-hoc network which enables students to engage in SMILE activities and exchange inquiries with peers in their classrooms or in their own schools. Participants in the SMILE Plug model must be physically present and connected to the ad-hoc SMILE WiFi network. A SMILE Plug router contains the SMILE server software, KIWIX, Khan Academy Lite, other various open education resources including open education textbooks, and four different coding language school programs.

SMILE Global enables students around the world to exchange their inquiries regardless of their location. People who are interested in a particular topic (e.g., for example, 'health') can search the keyword and also create their own questions, respond to existing questions, or comment on questions and answer. The SMILE Global server is accessible in the cloud.

Both SMILE Plug and SMILE Global allow students to incorporate multimedia components in their questions: SMILE Plug uses images, and SMILE Global uses images, audio and video.

Cost

The cost of implementing a SMILE activity depends on the infrastructure available at the school, but minimum costs amount to be around: $80 per mobile phone (one for every 2-3 students), $300 for a notebook laptop computer, and $100 for a local router.

Because of the ubiquitous nature of mobile devices, the low barrier to entry, and the modular growth potential, mobile devices provide a low-cost, high-reward alternative to the traditional computer lab model.

In many cases, business leaders provided local telecom network infrastructure and equipment such as mobile devices and computers, while local educational administrators facilitated the participation of local schools and offered teacher workshops. University staff conducted research on strategies to enhance the model within the local context and NGO partners provided localized knowledge, program oversight, and project coordination. This approach brings together many stakeholders, without exhausting the limited resources of any one sector.

In 2012, the SMILE team partnered with Marvell to create SMILE Consortium.

SMILE Plug on Raspberry Pi

SMILE Plug on Raspberry Pi

In 2016, the SMILE Plug was implemented on a Raspberry Pi 3. SMILE will boot in one minute when plugged into USB power. In developing countries with limited access to electricity, a USB battery pack is required. The Pi, designed for use in areas of low internet connectivity, provides a local WiFi access point. Students and teachers with mobile devices, tablets, laptops, and computers can connect to the Plug.

The Plug requires a microSD card which acts as the hard drive and local repository of the offline resources. In order to update the SMILE Plug, one will swap out the previous microSD card with a newer microSD card with updated resources.

The total cost of a SMILE Plug varies depending on the material parts used to build the device. The base price is $85, including $35 for the Raspberry Pi motherboard; $10 for a case; $40 for a 128GB Class 10 microSD card. A battery pack for 12 hours of use costs an additional $25; the LED screen an additional $40.

SMILE Global and Natural Language Processing

In 2017, SMILE Global will interface with a natural language processing API. The SMILE team has prepared a databank of questions pre-categorized according to the question quality rubric. The API will return a rating for each question that is submitted on SMILE Global. The immediate response and feedback will give students a chance to make improvements to their questions in real time.

The question quality rubric will allow teachers to gauge the level of learning from their students.

Projects

SMILE has reached over 25 countries, including the United States, India, Argentina, Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Nepal, China, Uruguay, Indonesia, South Korea, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Tanzania.

Argentina

Students used SMILE to think critically about what it means to be an engaged citizen in their community, generating questions for their peers about potential moral dilemmas such as homelessness, suicide, stealing, school bullying, and violence. One student addressed the increase in number of suicide incidents locally and asked their peers to investigate the major cause. Such additional benefits of SMILE manifest that it is not merely a tool for managing student learning and assessment, but that it also plays the role of prompting and facilitating discussions of deep, critical issues.

In 2012, the Ministry of Education in Buenos Aires looked into modifying the cell phone prohibition use in the classroom that had been in effect since 2006. In addition to using SMILE, educators can now create executable programs on mobile devices to help facilitate learning in the classroom.

SMILE workshops on Music, Language Arts, and Mathematics were implemented in Misiones and Talarin August 2011. By using an exploratory learning pedagogy, students were able to compose songs. The power of mobile devices to reach the last mile and the last school is most evident where electricity and internet access is not guaranteed.

In rural settings, desktop computers may be too cumbersome and have too high of an overhead. Mobile phones and tablets, on the other hand, are portable and battery-powered, allowing a flexible mobile-learning environment. One of the keys in deploying mobile technology is a focus on bringing the desired content with a strong pedagogical foundation.

Chile

Due to the centralized nature of Chile, it is harder for education to reach the poorest areas of the country. The concept of a mobile classroom, or "pocket school," connected and tied together by a network of mobile phones, is an attempt to take advantage of the resources already available in the most underserved communities.

Indonesia

Students were asked to generate math questions covering a wide range of topics, from triangle-angle sum theorem, to fractions, areas, and diameters. Teachers were surprised at the students’ enthusiasm. They were also surprised at the students’ ability to adopt the technology by themselves and to train each other and help even their teachers.

South Korea

SMILE Global was tested with medical students at Chungbuk National University. Criteria for high-quality questions, criteria rubrics, and examples of high- and low-quality questions were discussed with students first. This initial overview seemed to be important in promoting deep inquiry. As the students were already very experienced in using technology, they spent 60% of their time on the inquiry-making task.

Findings

The pre-service teachers reported that SMILE makes student thinking visible. Younger students are better at creating higher quality questions. Older students are already used to the traditional learning model where fact-recall is the major theme of classroom activities.

Quote from "Preservice teachers’ uses of SMILE to enact studentgenerated questioning practices"

Studies suggest that SMILE could be implemented relatively easily in a wide range of classroom settings; it was adopted by students relatively quickly, and it increased the use of inquiry-based pedagogies.

As students evaluated each other's questions and understood which ones got higher ratings, over time they developed questions that were more conceptually difficult and of higher quality.

Teachers need an initial training period and some follow-up mentoring so they can facilitate questions. Tailoring the content of the trainings to the local environment is crucial. Without putting the benefits of SMILE into the local context, teachers and students will find no compelling reason to adopt the pedagogy.

Finally, local education officials must be on board. SMILE worked best when officials, along with civil society organizations, universities, and local businesses, worked together to bring the software to classrooms.

Cohesiveness of Integration

The most important lesson here is that the process of developing critical thinking skills is probably not too different from the process of language acquisition: It takes time and good guidance along with ample exposure.

Quote from "Using Technology to Teach the Art of Asking Questions"

The success rate of implementing SMILE is dependent on how cohesively an inquiry-based pedagogy is tied to the curriculum taught at a school. While SMILE can be implemented with the existing curriculum (for example, with students asking simple recall math questions), it is most effective as an additional platform to foster critical thinking. This could come in the form of a regularly scheduled SMILE class each week to practice questioning. Although many students shy away at first, repeatedly practicing how to answer, rate, and create questions within a comfortable space will allow them to grow their higher-order thinking skills.

Higher teacher motivation, better classroom integration, and higher frequency of use are three factors that increase SMILE retention. Teachers are encouraged to help students become knowledge-holders and questioners; teachers themselves are encouraged to challenge the status quo of rote memorization inside the classroom. Though question-and-answer sessions may create uncomfortable situations where the teachers sole authority is questioned, the acquisition of knowledge and learning happens in this discomfort and is beneficial to the student's growth.

Student Engagement

For online classrooms, SMILE helps drive student engagement with the content, the community, and the instructor. A study on pre-service teachers meeting remotely showed positive correlation in using SMILE and achieving higher levels of collaboration, autonomy, and optimization of content relevance and authenticity.

Relationships between students and teachers changed during the SMILE workshops. Teachers were not simply transmitting information to students. Rather, students were drawing on written or digital resources to formulate their own questions. The teachers played important roles in guiding students through the solutions to difficult questions, correcting any mistakes, and elaborating on student-generated questions.

Challenges

Culture and school environments have a great influence on students’ initial abilities to form deep questions. In the developing world, many educators lack adequate teacher training. Their training is often limited to content, rather than pedagogical practices. In some cases, when teachers were asked to use new technology before they were comfortable with it, their discomfort led them to stifle students’ questions. Cultural norms governing relations between adults and students and situational authority roles may inhibit student questioning.

SMILE was more difficult to implement in areas where rote memorization pedagogies were typical teaching methodologies. Some students found it hard to generate their own questions, given their previous classroom experiences with rote memorization activities.

Additionally, students with little experience using smart phones took longer to understand and use the technology. Eventually, however, they adjusted after exploration.