Building Learning Communities in Blended Classrooms Through an Innovative mLearning System

Chinese classrooms have long suffered from a lack of interactivity. Many online classes simply provide recorded instructor lectures for students to listen to. This format only reinforces the negative effects of passive non-participatory learning. At a major university in Shanghai, researchers and developers actively seek technologic interventions that can greatly increase interactivity in online classes. They developed a cutting-edge mobile learning system that can deliver live broadcast of real-time classroom teaching to online students with mobile devices. This system allows students to customize means of content-reception.. The system also supports short text-messaging and instant polls. Through these venues, students can ask questions and make suggestions in real time, and the instructor can address them immediately. This paper describes this system in detail, and also reports results from a test implementation of the system with a blended classroom of 1000 students (250 campus and 750 online).