SMILE-pi: Enabling Access to Digital Open Education Resources

Bridging the Digital Divide

The SMILE-pi gets its name from the featured software.

SMILE (an acronym for Stanford Mobile Inquiry-based Learning Environment) turns a traditional classroom into a highly interactive learning environment by engaging students in critical reasoning and problem solving while enabling them to generate, share, and evaluate multimedia-rich inquiries.

LEARNING OUTCOMES: Question generation, a leading indicator of critical thinking, involves making judgments, creatively synthesizing essential concepts, and clearly formulating a text that triggers critical thinking. Through regular SMILE sessions, students learn to generate high-quality questions that provide evidence of improvements in their critical thinking skills.

HOW THIS TECHNOLOGY SUPPORTS LEARNING: The SMILE server software is designed to create a highly interactive learning environment that promotes higher order learning opportunities (e.g., creation of inquiries, presentation of questions, analysis of peer-generated questions, evaluation of individual students and overall class performance, etc.); engage students in inquiry-based learning sessions at a global scale; generates transparent real-time learning analytics.

In addition to SMILE, the SMILE-pi also includes software such as Wikipedia for Schools, Khan Academy videos and exercises, software for teaching coding skills and much more!