134 – Introducing Michael Obiero: Rethinking Maths Textbooks

[00:00:00] David: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m David Stern, a founding director of IDEMS, and it’s my privilege today to be here with former student of mine, a colleague, a friend, Dr. Michael Obiero from Maseno University, the Kenyan Math Society, we’re both on the STACK board.

We’ve done an episode before and I have a feeling you’ll be going to now become a regular feature because you’ve got so many exciting projects on. Today I’d love to talk about well, the inspiring work with these interns on the Kenyan textbook.

So hi, Mike.

[00:00:49] Mike: Hi David, thank you so much for the kind words, the kind introduction. Indeed, we’ve had a long journey from when I was a student of yours. And I appreciate your constant mentorship through the years, through my Ph. D. in the U. S. and then coming back to Maseno, where you encouraged me even when I was going through the challenges of teaching at the university at the moment.

And it was largely through our communication and your encouragement that I got to learn about the STACK technology. We were, some of the first people to try electronic assessment of mathematics at the university level in Kenya, that was way back in 2019. So it’s been a journey that has led me to be part of the International STACK Advisory Board, board member. It’s given me an opportunity to be the leader of the African STACK community. And also the chair of the Kenya Mathematical Society.

These have put me in a unique position to contribute to the academic sector in the country from all levels: way from the universities all the way to the junior secondary level and even the primary schools.

[00:02:08] David: This sort of range of things you’re doing, this is why we’re going to have to have many different episodes, I’m afraid, because at some point I want to talk to you about MSc in Maths Innovation, I’d like to talk to you about what you’re doing with TVETS.

[00:02:24] Mike: Yes.

[00:02:24] David: Which is so exciting. And of course the work across the universities, maybe after the African Stack Conference later this year, we can have another episode on that and on that work at the university level. But the thing I’m so excited about, and we met recently in Kenya related to this, and I came out energised.

[00:02:44] Mike: Yeah.

[00:02:46] David: The work you’re doing authoring textbook for schools. Just very quickly, I’ve been interested in this for over 10 years. This has been a sort of pet desire and a pet project of mine in different ways that I kept trying to get into but never had the opportunity.

And then suddenly you sweep in and you get 10 interns on it and you’ve done it and you’re getting there, that it’s amazing!

[00:03:13] Mike: The motivation is the current implementation of the curriculum in the country. The country wants to reform its curriculum all the way from preschool, where they’re introducing competencies as part of the learning, the formal learning students get in class. And we’ve had implementation challenges at junior secondary level in the sense that a completely new level that’s being introduced as part of the curriculum.

[00:03:38] David: I’m conscious that a lot of our audience, CBC curriculum, this is the competency based curriculum. This is something where Kenya is really at the forefront, but many countries are looking at this in different ways and have different elements of this coming in. And it didn’t just create a new curriculum, as you said, it created new schools. Before the competency based curriculum, Kenya had what it called 844, which was primary eight years, eight years of secondary and then, sorry four years of secondary, sorry, not eight.

[00:04:14] Mike: Four years of secondary and four years of university, that’s correct. Yes.

[00:04:18] David: And this is now totally changed to seven, three, three.

[00:04:24] Mike: Yeah.

[00:04:24] David: Where you now have seven years of primary, three years of junior secondary, three years of senior secondary.

[00:04:32] Mike: That’s correct.

[00:04:33] David: And this took the country by surprise in a way which was, from an international perspective unthinkable, they got to the junior secondary and junior secondary schools didn’t exist. And so now there was this question, is a secondary school going to take junior secondary school students or a primary school is going to take junior secondary school students? And so there was a whole confusion which emerged at that level within Kenya for a number of years.

And that was three years ago because we’re now coming to the end of the third year of junior secondary, or maybe just less than three years ago. Is that correct so far?

[00:05:15] Mike: You’ll be amazed that the end of last year it was not clear where grade nine was going to be hosted. Was it going to be hosted in primary where you have grade seven and eight or was it going to be hosted in secondary where we have the four years that’s being phased out. But it was resolved that it’s going to be held in primary schools.

So that’s a whole new school, the junior secondary, that’s being established and the government had to hire new teachers for this new school. And because the government was not prepared adequately, we had challenges in the sense that teachers were randomly being assigned to schools.

You had a school which didn’t have a math teacher or you had a school that the math teachers that were teaching the junior secondary were the teachers from the primary school. And because it’s a secondary school curriculum, there was a whole struggle of teachers to deliver that content.

Another motivation is that the textbooks we have currently are not, how do I put this? They don’t deliver the content in the way that bring up the competencies that the government wants the students to have.

[00:06:35] David: Can I just be clear on this?

[00:06:36] Mike: Yeah.

[00:06:37] David: There are established textbook providers who have been creating good textbooks for years.

[00:06:44] Mike: Right.

[00:06:45] David: They’ve now been challenged to produce these competency based textbooks, but they’re not trained on how to do competency based learning. And so what’s actually happened is many of the textbooks, they’re just like the textbooks that were there before. They’re bringing small tweaks, but there hasn’t been a real embracing of what it means to be thinking about competencies and so on.

[00:07:08] Mike: That’s correct. And in my discussion, and I think this came out strongly when we had an AIM funded workshop last August discussing with the math educators, math education researchers, we had lecturers, and we had developers of technologies. That’s where I met these amazing people who are developing the PreText technology of writing textbooks.

I had a discussion with the math education researchers explaining some of the ways of bringing these competencies to students. And obviously, as lecturers who are there mourning about the challenges we have teaching mathematics and how it’s difficult getting the attention of students.

[00:07:51] David: Can I come in here? Because you mentioned AIM and that is the American Institute of Mathematics. And this was a really special workshop because this is, I believe, the first AIM workshop to ever be held in Africa using the AIM workshop model, and it brought together American with international, with Kenyan, as you said, a whole diversity of people with different backgrounds. And this is where the textbook idea really took root for you.

[00:08:24] Mike: Yes. And it’s thanks to Franca Hoffman, Joe Champion, Mary Ochieng obviously, and myself who are on the team that was applying for that project or for that workshop to happen in Africa. And it’s also a great appreciation to David Farmer, who made it happen, and who is also a developer of PreText. So it’s through the discussions we had that I started having that idea.

But I think what drove the message home was the Africa STACK conference that came immediately after the workshop. And it was a discussion I was having with you, in fact, you were encouraging me to write a textbook. And I’m a teacher at the university, and obviously, my thoughts are, what can I do about a textbook at university level? But, listening to teachers, and I’m very well connected to teachers, the challenges they’re going through, it became clear that we needed to have an intervention at the seconded level.

And it’s also a great thanks to the American Embassy in Kenya, there’s a grant we applied with the support of Franca. Initially it was supposed to support a parallel workshop to the AIM workshop, but because the funds came in late, we had to rethink how the funds were going to be used.

And I had an idea of having interns. And what a great way of having interns to learn about new stuff and contribute to education. Initially we wanted nine, but after discussions with Zach, Zach is the director of INNODEMS, and INNODEMS is supporting the interns currently, they are being hosted at the INNODEMS offices. So he told me that we are working on a textbook, we are having five topics and nine interns. To create balance, we needed to have at least two interns per topic. So it made sense to have 10 interns. I had to readjust the budget to accommodate the 10 interns we have. And they’re doing an amazing job.

[00:10:36] David: Let me just come in on this for a second. Because this is something which again from an international audience perspective, this makes no sense. But from the experience I’ve got working in Kenya and seeing this is how things often work, that you apply for a grant for one thing, the funding decision came in after that event which you’d applied for had taken place. And so now you’ve got the grant but you couldn’t use it for what it was intended for because it was too late. And so now you had this opportunity to say what is this grant going to be after you got it?

[00:11:12] Mike: Yes.

[00:11:13] David: And that was amazing because the outcome of the event led to this idea of doing this textbook. And that’s where you were then able to conceive a way to use the grant to have these amazing set of interns and to get them to get stuck into authoring the textbook. And I came to visit you just recently, and I was blown away.

I’ve been involved with interns over the years in Kenya in different ways, and I love your set of interns, but then like many other sets of interns I’ve seen. What blew me away was the set of tasks and the way you’d structured it and the way you were mentoring this to be able to make sure that they’re actually, they’re doing it. And unless I’m mistaken, the big thing which changed from my visit was your initial ambition was to do a grade seven textbook. What’s your current ambition?

[00:12:10] Mike: My current ambition is to do the entire junior secondary curriculum in the next two months and move on to the senior secondary curriculum, which is a total of six books if you wish. And this is driven by a couple of things, and one of them, obviously, is the discussion I had with you, that we needed to create impact across board, and focusing on one grade alone was not going to do it.

And another is that you mentioned that the groups often times, I have just an amazing group, and It’s not a coincidence because they were carefully chosen. We took the top performing students from four institutions in the country. And like other interns we’ve had we have not had any type of hand holding with this set of interns.

Set them loose. They’ve had an amazing training from one of the previous interns we had. On STACK authoring. That’s the intern with currently an employee of INNODEMS, working on STACK work. Then they’ve had training on web work authoring. That’s authoring web work questions from Dr. Robin Cruz. who was also a participant of the AIM workshop.

Then they’ve had training from, uh, Professor Oscar Levine on PreText authoring, and he’s just an amazing instructor. They’ve had training from Santiago Borio, of course, of IDEMS. They’ve had training from Georg Gosang of IDEMS, of course.

They keep on getting week long trainings, and it’s just one week of a Zoom call from an expert, and they are able to pick the concepts pretty quickly. Instead of taking an entire three months trainings these guys, they are training as they are working on the textbook and once they are done with the grade seven textbook, which is basically a training exercise then be sufficiently experienced and knowledgeable to move on pretty quickly with the grades eight and nine.

So that’s one of the motivation.

[00:14:21] David: Let me just check here because I heard before entering into this call that when you say when they finish with grade seven, isn’t that basically where they are now?

[00:14:33] Mike: So they are basically done with the book, the only thing left is the STACK assessment questions.

And that’s left because we still have to sort out the integration of STACK in Pretext.

[00:14:49] David: . Again, our listeners may not see the significance of this. You’re not just using the tools. You’re forcing the development of the tools to enable your use case. This is great. These are open source tools.

Pretext is widely used. Stack is widely used and so on. But they’re not integrated at the moment. And on the back of the AIM workshop and of your needs, this is pushing forward and it’s likely this integration is going to happen. It’s, you’re, the technology is being developed to enable you to do this.

[00:15:22] Mike: Yes, and it was a huge discussion. It was part of the discussion during the AIM workshop, that how can we make different platforms operate in harmony if there’s need. And what’s happening here is that we have a need of having STACK questions. WebWorks works quite well in PreText, but there are aspects of StackQuestions that WebWork cannot do in the same way.

And that’s why we need STACK questions. So we are not really forcing, but strongly convincing.

[00:16:01] David: You don’t have the power to force. You’re just convincing. As you say, you’re influencing.

[00:16:09] Mike: Yes. The developer of STACK is a friend of mine Chris Sangwin. He’s a great friend. His interest is to see the technology used across board, and for anyone who wants to use it, he’s happy to support. And so it’s been very supportive of the initiative we have in Africa.

[00:16:27] David: I should come in here and also just clarify that this is also Sal and Georg who are part of the IDEMS team. Are part of making this happen as well. So we’re here. This is something we are not passive observers on. We’re actually trying to actively provide the human resource to make this happen because these are open source technologies.

[00:16:51] Mike: Yes.

[00:16:53] David: And creating these opportunities to get them used based on your needs is exactly what it should be doing.

[00:17:01] Mike: And that perhaps is a discussion for another topic of why there’s need to have a support team behind these open technologies to make them useful, especially in the context that we operate in Africa, where the resources are scarce.

But it’s been great having the support of developers of different platforms. It’s been great having the enthusiasm they have towards learning about what we are doing and actually providing trainings in some cases Oscar giving his time to train the interns. And this was done free of charge.

He just volunteered to provide the training. Same with the Robin Cruz. So it’s been extremely humbling having people who are extremely knowledgeable and experts in their own right. Volunteering their time and services to support us. We could not have money. We don’t have funding for that.

[00:18:02] David: But let’s be clear on this. This is, in some sense, the U. S. Embassy. This was the nature of the collaboration that they were looking. They were wanting to build this collaboration between U. S. universities, U. S. academics, and, you coming back and your team and building a team here. So that was, this was not by chance, this was by design.

[00:18:24] Mike: True.

[00:18:25] David: and that’s really important that it’s sort of, these collaborations, these international collaborations they do take resource. The U. S. embassy money couldn’t be spent in the U. S., it could only be spent in Kenya. So as you say, even though you had a small, $50, 000 was it? $25, 000?

[00:18:45] Mike: 25, 000, yes.

[00:18:46] David: 25, 000 from the embassy to run all of this, have the interns to to write six textbooks. This is, you’ve done pretty well on that money. But it’s all been because you’ve also had the connection and part of the embassy grant was to have this human connection with U. S. counterparts.

[00:19:06] Mike: Yes. So I had connections initially and the aim workshop provided a platform for creating even more connections.

[00:19:19] David: This is exactly what it was designed to do and what the U. S. embassy funding was designed to enable to support so that wasn’t a one off thing that had continuity and actually led to something more, which it’s doing, which is amazing.

No, and we haven’t even mentioned the MSc program, which is coming out of it and all the other amazing things. But anyway, let’s stick to the textbooks. Let me just come back to the other thing which I took away from when I came to visit, is the ambition.

[00:19:52] Mike: Yes.

[00:19:53] David: And the ambition for these textbooks is huge.

But what’s so interested me is… If you put all your efforts into one textbook with all the internet and so on, you still couldn’t reach your ambition there and instead taking the approach of saying, okay, these are open source textbooks, they’re going to improve over time. They’re not going to be one off pieces of work.

Yes, there’ll be a lot more work to make them better in the future and so on. But we need to get something which is good enough. To be useful now, and this is that desire to actually get a team that can author that textbook, which is going to be interactive, useful, digital textbook, openly available.

[00:20:36] Mike: Yes.

[00:20:37] David: And could transform the education in many contexts.

[00:20:42] Mike: Yes.

[00:20:43] David: Also printable. This is important. The PreText, the key feature of it is you author the printable textbook, and printable in braille and printable on as a digital textbook, all as one entity, which can then exist. So these can be printed, they can be printed in braille, they can be, made available digitally as a PDF or as an interactive website. And so on.

All of these as a single authoring task. And that’s what’s so powerful about this, that you’re you have this digital interactive textbook with embedded STACK questions with whole computer algebra systems behind it, providing incredible power. Yeah. And you have a printable textbook, which is available and can be printed out and made available and they can be linked together in powerful ways.

So that process. And doing this with open textbooks, this is potentially revolutionary for what’s happening in Kenya.

[00:21:47] Mike: It’s, that’s very true. And it’s, you mentioned the question of quality. And that was at the back of my mind when I was going into developing the textbook. So we have current textbooks that are being used for teaching students.

And we’ve noticed lots of mistakes in the textbooks. So one thing we wanted to get right in the initial version was to have, like you mentioned a working textbook that doesn’t have mistakes, that includes all these interactive activities, assessment and leveraging the power of PreTexts, where you can print the book in braille, you can download a PDF.

You can interact with the online web version of the book. The initial plan is to have that initial version of the book ready. And then, we’ll now embark on the next phase, which is continually improving the quality of the book. The hope is to have the book at international standards. Not just for Kenya.

You mentioned that there are other countries that are implementing CBC. And the hope is that it will not only benefit Kenya, but other countries that are also implementing the CBC curriculum. So it’s, the ambition is beyond Kenya.

[00:23:06] David: Absolutely, and my interest in textbooks is not limited to Kenya, it never was.

I’m interested in textbooks internationally, in the UK, in the US, where there is a big need for, I believe, a different way of having textbooks. And I think this is where that textbook, you won’t get to that quality immediately. I was going in, I was highly critical, and I was holding back.

But the stages you can go through from there and the way you can then go through these iterative cycles to improve and to get up to speed and now to get involved in the international academic groups, giving feedback and contributing, making it really world class. That’s a whole other process that once you have these open textbooks can now flourish. And this is so exciting. And, I’m so excited by this collaboration. Are there any last thoughts or any last things you want to share?

[00:23:59] Mike: At some point we’ll have a discussion of the math camps, their origin and how they’ve developed over the years.

But I just wanted to mention that we are thinking about including some of the fun activities: puzzles, games in the textbook. Just reading the curriculum can get a bit boring for students. So having a puzzle that triggers this student’s mind or a game that excites him, we feel that can be an integral or an important component of the textbook.

I had a discussion. We recently had a math camp in Homa Bay. That’s a region in Kenya. And just talking to teachers who are interacting with some of these games for the first time. They were like, oh, having something like that in a book will actually capture students’ attention. That they can actually use this even in class when they’re teaching.

Before they introduce a concept, they start with a game or a puzzle. That’s just strengthened our idea of including some of these math camp activities as part of the textbook as well. So I felt that was an important addition to the discussion.

[00:25:09] David: Which is so exciting, this idea that the extracurricular and the curricular start to intertwine. You’re not saying that this is part of the curriculum, this is a deliberately within the textbook, an extracurricular activity, which would be optional, but which would be there for stimulation, exactly as we’ve seen this to be so impactful over the years. Oh, it’s so exciting.

[00:25:32] Mike: I’m glad you see the excitement in what we are doing. Thank you.

[00:25:36] David: It’s been a long time. We’ve been on a lot of this journey together in different ways, but it’s amazing to me, and it’s always amazing to me how for years and years, I’ve been hoping for these things to happen, planning for them to happen, looking for opportunities, looking for funding, failing to get funding, and all these things.

And then suddenly. It happened and it’s happening in a way which is so organic. It’s bottom up. It’s growth. You’re doing it brilliantly in the right way. And it’s so exciting to see. So big congratulations. It’s been a pleasure discussing this with you. As you can hear, I’m excited by this work.

I’m following keenly. I’m giving support as I can. And I’m delighted. I think this is great stuff. So really well done.

[00:26:28] Mike: Thank you so much, David. Extremely grateful for the words of encouragement. And I’ll be looking forward to your critique of the work we are doing and also your input.

I know you can be a harsh critic, but if it’s to improve the quality of the work we are doing and welcome any critic you give. So thank you so much for having me. Thank you for the discussion and I look forward to having your input and your colleagues input. Obviously. In the work we are doing.

So thank you so much.

[00:26:58] David: Thanks. And I’m afraid you won’t escape this. I will want to grab you for another episode soon because the MSc in Maths Innovation is also exciting. So that’s a whole other discussion.

[00:27:11] Mike: It’s been more than 10 years in the making. I look forward to that.

[00:27:15] David: Let’s wait for it to be maybe approved first as a program before we have that discussion, but that’s coming in the next few months. We hope to have an episode on the MSC in Maths Innovation.

[00:27:28] Mike: Yes.

[00:27:29] David: Thank you so much. Thanks, Mike.

[00:27:31] Mike: Thank you, David.