Pedagogical Innovation in Islamic Education: Developing the SMART-Islami Framework from Singapore's aLIVE Programme
Abstract
This study aims to develop SMART-Islami, a conceptual pedagogical framework for reconstructing smart education within Islamic epistemology. Smart-education models have explained the integration of intelligent technologies and adaptive pedagogy, but they have not sufficiently clarified what educational “intelligence” should ultimately serve, particularly in Islamic education, where the formation of iman, akhlaq, and adab is central. Using Singapore’s aLIVE (Learning Islamic Values Everyday) programme under the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (MUIS) as an instrumental case, this study analysed a bounded corpus of nine primary documents published between 2014 and 2026. The documents included MUIS programme and policy publications, Singapore education-policy and data-protection documents, and independent peer-reviewed studies of aLIVE. Data were examined through directed content analysis based on the three elements of smart education and the five characteristics of smart learning, followed by conceptual synthesis. The findings show that aLIVE’s documented strengths are mainly reflected in value modelling and community-based instruction, while differentiated instruction, learning analytics, and personalised learning pathways are not clearly evidenced in the analysed documents. These are reported as documentary gaps rather than confirmed gaps in practice. SMART-Islami reinterprets the five characteristics of smart learning through a specified Maqasid al-shari’ah formulation and presents a six-stage implementation model from teacher-and-curriculum input to character formation. As a conceptual proposition, the framework requires empirical validation through a single-centre design-based pilot using measurable character-formation indicators.
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