An Agile Approach for Inquiry-Based Learning in Ubiquitous Environment

Abstract

Education is an evolving field where challenges are constantly changing of content and learners' needs. Thus, there was a shift in pedagogy from teacher-centric to student-centric learning with the advancement of technology. In recent times, the concept of smart classrooms or ubiquitous learning (u-learning) environment has been prevalent in the learning domain as it increases the accessibility of resources and learning activities anywhere, anytime using smart devices and internet. Also, enhance engagement by creating interactive, engaging, and enjoyable learning experience. Inquiry-based learning (IBL) is an effective instructional strategy that can be in the form of a problem or task used for triggering student engagement and enhancing students’ knowledge by introducing inquiring activities for fostering critical thinking, problem-solving, and student engagement. Also, ubiquitous learning environments integrate real-world and digital-world resources and learning scenarios, thus providing a new opportunity for implementing technologyenhanced inquiry-based activities to enrich student learning experience. But, implementing IBL in a ubiquitous learning environment within school settings presents its own set of challenges, especially in structuring and controlling collaboration effectively. Collaborative learning is a process of sharing knowledge and constructing meaning by complete involvement of all the peers discuss what they know and gain more knowledge with the help of other peers. Agile methodologies are very successful in the software engineering domain for collaboration professional development environment. These methodologies have been used for quite some time to teach software engineering concepts and agile development using a projectdriven approach in computer science. Due to their incremental, iterative, adaptive, and collaborative nature, they have gained popularity in educational domains. There is a lack in literature about the use of agile methods in IBL in ubiquitous environment. Moreover, there is also the opportunity to develop agile-based teaching approaches for other disciplines other than computing, particularly for school students.VIII The significance of this study is about the developing and evaluating the ScrumBan Ubiquitous Inquiry Framework (SBUIF) through the uASK application for collaborative IBL amongst school students. For evaluation purposes, computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) affordances, along with micro and meso levels of the M3 evaluation framework, have been applied. An experiment was conducted to test the effectiveness of the uASK application against Trello application. The sample involved 205 seventh-grade students. Results showed that the uASK learners scored better than those using Trello. At the micro-level, student satisfaction score by uASK users was 77.14% in comparison to Trello users which was 54.12%. It showed significant improvement and revealing better results in technology, communication, and learning performance. The meso-level measures of students learning performance revealed that uASK users had better learning outcomes then Trello (68.88% vs 58.13% for post-test improvement). Also more efficient use of time (34.7% faster). Thus, the results showed that uASK users were more engaged, satisfied, and enjoyed uASK more than the other users. The study further recommends that uASK is more effective than Trello in promoting collaborative learning activities inquiring approach in any place. The study demonstrates that the use of such framework and application based on SBUIF can support agile based collaborative inquiry learning at school level, thereby advancing knowledge in the fields of agile and inquiry-based education. Furthermore, by implementing the framework in a real-world classroom setting, it highlights its practical value, offering guidance for educators in designing similar applications to support future teaching and learning