140 – Electronic Maths Textbooks in Kenya

[00:00:00] David: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. My name’s David Stern. I’m a founding director of IDEMS, and it’s my pleasure to be back again with Zachary Mbasu, the director of INODEMS, one of our partners in Kenya, and a longtime friend and collaborator. Hi, Zach.

[00:00:22] Zach: Hi, David. Thank you so much for having me again. And it’s a pleasure to be here.

[00:00:28] David: I’m really keen to follow up on our discussion from last time. Last time you were telling us about the Maths Camp and how you’ve taken the idea that we started years ago and now facilitating camps with hundreds of students, and now you’re also taking on textbooks, and you’re doing this with another colleague who I’ve been discussing this a bit with, Michael Obiero.

[00:00:52] Zach: But I’m really keen to get this from your perspective and to really hear what you’re thinking, why this is so important. This is, of course, the competency based curriculum. Why textbooks? Why now? What are you doing?

[00:01:07] Zach: If you’re aware, in Kenya, we are in a transition period where the new curriculum, competency based curriculum, is being implemented in phases, as we transition into the new education system within Kenya. And of course, because it’s still new, there are numerous challenges.

Of course, like the obvious one’s limited infrastructure and resources to ensuring that teachers are actually trained and equipped. And these challenges require like a new way of thinking on how to, you know, support the system, support the school, support the teachers to overcome these challenges.

And this is where we thought about developing, you know, a different kind of textbook, specifically for math, so that math teachers could use this textbook to address some of the challenges that are related to the competency based curriculum and be able to implement better and be able to be good teachers as well as give good learning experiences to our learners.

[00:02:14] David: And this work, you’ve been doing this in collaboration, as I say, with Michael Obiero, who has been on previous episodes and will, I’m sure, be on other episodes soon. I’ll discuss this with him as well. But, at the heart of supporting the textbooks is the fact that for a long time, we’ve been aware that getting feedback to students has helped at the university level.

So when you’re talking about these textbooks, one of the key things which I understand you’re doing, and you have a whole set of interns working on, is ensuring that the textbooks include assessment with automated feedback and personalised feedback. Do you want to just say a little bit more about that?

[00:03:06] Zach: Yes, and first I want to acknowledge my colleague, Mike Obiero, Dr. Mike Obiero, who is a lecturer at Maseno University, he’s really the one who has been, like, spearheading this. And together with him, we have this set of ten interns who are recent graduates, they just graduated from the university, very enthusiastic, very brilliant people who we thought would help us in authoring the textbook.

The textbook has got, majorly two components. One, it’s the content where we are using PreText to be able to author the content that learners are going to be able to experience and teachers are going to use. And then we also have a very important component that we are using, this tool called STACK, which is, basically a tool for one, creating and then two, delivering online assessment so that we can provide students with more opportunities for practice and also provide students with feedback in a way that is not humanly possible.

So with STACK, we are able to, not just to author questions that learners can experience, but also, in the feedback we able to generate like the personalised feedback that can help students address their specific challenges and also provide individualised support for students who have different levels in terms of learning the concepts.

[00:04:37] David: I’m really glad you’ve mentioned the technologies because these are central to it. We’ve had actually Chris Sangwin, the founder of STACK on this before, he’s in a previous episode. And this has been really conceived for higher education, but using it. And other tools, I believe you’re using WebWork as well, for schools, education is equally needed and valid.

But the thing I want to draw on at the moment is actually PreText, which you just mentioned, because this is something which has come out of developing open textbooks which can exist in multiple formats. The real power of this, as I understand it, is that you are able to author a single textbook which can exist as an online interactive textbook and it can be a PDF and it can be printed as a printed textbook and it can exist as a braille textbook.

And so as a single entity the same authoring can be used and can be published in these different ways to digital, to print, for special needs in different ways. And this is a really technical solution, but it’s one which is really of its moment for you because in the Kenyan context, the shift towards digital, many students, schools, have access, but not everyone has access. So the printed textbook remains extremely important, but moving towards the digital textbook and having that correspondence between the two is just revolutionary in your context. And yet it’s something which the authoring system you’re using is set up to do.

[00:06:37] Zach: Yes, you are right and this is very powerful, because, as you mentioned, yes, there are students who have access to internet, they have access to devices, they can access the online textbook, but we also have a huge proportion of students who do not have access to any form of technology or internet connectivity. And the fact that with PreText you can have an online version which can be easily updated in case there are updates to the content, but again, the fact that you can print this textbook in you know, like a PDF it means that students and teachers can have an offline access without necessarily needing the internet, which is very powerful.

But also what is really, really, powerful is this fact that in generating the PDF, you can actually generate a PDF that has got, you know, the same content, but the questions has got different variables, which means that, you know, theoretically, you could have a textbook that is having examples and tasks that are different for each learner if you are sharing individually this PDF with the learners.

And then, the other thing is that, you know, teachers within Kenya, they have these communities of practice where they form WhatsApp groups and they’re always sharing resources. And if you have these offline versions and you have these PDFs, you know, a teacher could send in this community of practice and say, ‘Hey, I have this textbook, that I’ve been using that is very powerful. Could you try and use it to teach a particular concept’, which is very, very, very powerful.

[00:08:29] David: This is all still hypothetical because still these textbooks are being authored, I believe you finished, or the team has finished grade seven, it’s going on to grade eight, and you’re aiming to get grades nine and ten to follow at least later this year.

But the real power of it is because these are open, the expectation is, as you put it, that the digital version can evolve quite quickly, it can improve. And that’s something else which I’m really excited about, the fact that there aren’t any open textbooks, as far as I know, of the Kenyan curriculum. And so, just the power of bringing the concept of an open textbook to the Kenyan curriculum is in itself an interesting advance.

[00:09:19] Zach: Yes, so, currently the textbooks that are in school are all commercial textbooks. So either the government buys from the publishers and then distributes, or a parent can, you know, like go to the bookshop and buy this textbook, this physical textbook for the learners. And sometimes schools also buy from the publishers.

And sometimes, in some areas, those textbooks are great, and in other areas we see opportunities for improvement, to improve the learning experience. And this is why having this open textbook that can be easily updated is very powerful. And also the fact that it’s free, it also means that this is very inclusive. You know, anyone who would like to have the textbook, they can have access to the textbook and be able to use it.

[00:10:11] David: Well, let me just check that I understand. The printed textbook will, of course, not be free because there’s costs involved with that. But the digital textbook, because it’s open, can be freely available. And that’s really part of this different approach to building textbooks. We don’t expect the need and the desire for physical textbooks to go away. And having printed versions, this is a sensible continued business model, in some sense, to be able to produce them.

The difference being that having digital copies and people being able to print their own, these are now options that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

[00:10:52] Zach: Yes, and that’s why, like, having the textbook published in PreText is very powerful. You know, we have all these options for different scenarios and we are not, like, denying anyone an opportunity to access despite their background or their challenges.

[00:11:13] David: Absolutely. One of the things which I think is exciting about this is that it’s not just that you’re creating this opportunity as an open textbook, but you already have ideas about how to be able to, engage the readers into the process of developing it because it’s open.

And so actually getting review processes where teachers, learners can review it and feed back in to the digital version. Having those feedback mechanisms built into the digital version is something which we’re investigating with you how to have those structures. And I’m excited by the potential that that gives to be able to actually build a community around improving this, these textbooks.

[00:12:01] Zach: Yes, I’m equally excited because we don’t just want to create the textbook and give it to the students and give it to the teachers. We also want to build it with them. We want teachers to look at the textbook and be able to give us feedback and say, hey, we want this particular section improved this way, this suggestion, we think if we have this idea in the textbook, it could be improved.

[00:12:27] David: So we are working on building that feedback mechanism so that we can always get feedback from the users, build with the users, get feedback from the teachers and also the learners using the textbook. And we use that rich, you know, feedback and information and intelligence that is coming from them to be able to improve on the textbook as they continue using it.

[00:12:52] David: Let me just be clear. You’ve mentioned students in this, and this is not new to you. This has actually been part of your work over the last ten years or so. You’ve been working with Professor Eric Hammerton and his team coming out of Pepperdine on this fact that getting students involved in content creation is an extremely powerful learning mechanism as well.

[00:13:20] Zach: Yes. So through that work with Dr. Eric Hamilton, one of the key things we’ve learned is that as students articulate what they are learning and articulate their ideas, and they are able to explain the ideas as they give feedback, then they have a much better understanding of the ideas and the concepts in the textbook, than when they are not explaining.

So, with this powerful, approach that if you’re able to explain something then you understand it, we want to take advantage of that and build in so that we are building together with the learners.

[00:14:02] David: Absolutely, which is really exciting.

I want to come back to something you mentioned is almost a throwaway comment, but I think it’s a really important one. You mentioned this dream of almost having the personalised textbook. Again, this is something where this could be personalised to a student as you presented it, but this could also be personalised to a school or to an institution or a set of schools, where there may be opportunities for you to collaborate with sets of schools, because it’s open, to collaborate to creating tailored versions of these textbooks and producing them.

And that’s something which I’ve not really seen enough of. But it’s so exciting once you’ve got the concept of an open textbook, to be able to think about what would it look like if you have your set of schools in Yanza, which are, let’s say, all girls schools, where they actually think about tailoring the textbooks to their students so the examples are more relevant for them. And maybe some of that comes back into the open textbook, but maybe it is just for that group.

And these are really exciting opportunities which emerge, and which I’m really interested to see what happens as this sort of gets out if it gets popular.

[00:15:27] Zach: Yeah, of course, we are very ambitious, we want to create a textbook that is contextualized for, you know, groups of students or cultures. Of course students in rural areas have got different contexts compared to students who live, for example, in Nairobi or in the capital city. So we are ambitious that maybe we’ll get to a point where we for students who are from farming communities we want to be having math examples that relate to the farming activities that parents do in their farms.

And for those communities for example, that are pastoralists, we want to be having examples of activities and questions and assessments that relate to the cultural context of, you know, pastoralists like, you know, taking care of cattle and so forth, so that it really resonates with them so that they can focus on learning the concepts, and breaking that barrier of context.

The way the current textbooks are structured, sometimes they do give examples that are based on city context that even the rural students do not really have an idea of those contexts.

So it’s ambitious, but this is also again only possible if we are able to get feedback from their teachers, from those contexts, and also get feedback from the learners from those contexts and tailor that textbook towards those particular contexts.

[00:16:56] David: And this is, as I say, this is an ambition, which I feel is really exciting. It’s something which, if we’re able to get this, you know, we’re keen to support you, but if we’re able to get the structures in place that enable this idea of having a textbook, which gets contextualized, oh, I can see how this could be something which really helps the idea of the competency based curriculum.

And I suppose that’s what I’d like to finish by asking you. This is what the essence of the competency based curriculum is supposed to be. And I see you really living it in a way which is so hard and so exciting.

[00:17:39] Zach: Oh yes, as you know, the new curriculum develops competencies for the learners, we hope that with this kind of resource creation and supporting with materials they can use, they will be able to have competencies that would be useful in their context, so that they have skills that they can easily apply in their respective context that makes sense, and move away from, you know, the usual theoretical competencies that are out of context for the learners experiencing this curriculum.

I just want to sort of reinforce what you’ve just said, that it is the same curriculum, the same competencies that people are trying to get in terms of the mathematical abilities, but it is the contextualization of those competencies to students’ needs, their environment, their experiences, that only really becomes possible if you have these sorts of tools, which are adaptive. And this is where standardization is so important and it’s great. But the ability to contextualize something where there is a standard, this is what I believe the spirit of the competency based curriculum is all about.

Yes, so this is about adapting to the individual student’s needs, supporting them, and them getting feedback and guidance on their needs. And this will in the end help them to identify, you know, where their strengths are, where their weaknesses are, and then focus their, you know, the efforts on areas where they need to really improve.

[00:19:26] David: I want to just take an example that I’ve seen you do when you’re with teachers. And you often have a dice in your pocket. Why do you have a dice in your pocket when you talk to teachers?

[00:19:40] Zach: Very interesting. So when I was at school, through my primary school, secondary school, and even at universities, I often received questions and tasks, especially on probability, that were requiring me to do activities using a dice. And the whole of my life I had never seen a dice. So I was working on these problems just imagining what a dice looks like.

So when I finished university and started teaching, I bought a dice in Nairobi. And the way I imagined a dice looks like and the way like it was physically looking, it was very different. So I made this conscious decision to always walk with that dice in my pocket so that those problems and activities that are based on dice would make sense to the learners, and even to some of the teachers, you know, that are teaching these concepts.

And this brings out this idea and concepts that sometimes we have got very good content in the resources we have, but that content is not really contextualized to our settings or to the student settings. So the students miss the concepts because they are out of context, the problem is out of context of what they can be able to imagine and experience.

[00:21:02] David: Yeah. Thank you so much for that. It’s one of those things, this is something I will always carry with me, that example of why contextualization is so important. It’s not about how good your resources are, how good your materials are, are they actually contextualized, are they locally relevant, is the difference between success and failure.

Really excited to hear what you’re doing. Thank you for the time on this. And at some point I want to talk to you about early childhood education because you’re also doing some exciting things there. But that’ll have to be another episode.

[00:21:39] Zach: Thank you so much, David. It’s always a pleasure . I’m very happy to talk about early family math in our next episode.

[00:21:47] David: Sounds good. Great. All the best.

[00:21:50] Zach: Thank you.