158 – Innovative MSc Programme for Maths Teachers in Kenya, Part 3

David: [00:00:00] Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. My name is David Stern, I’m a founding director of IDEMS, and it’s my privilege again to be here with Michael Obiero. Mike, this is our third episode in relatively quick succession because you’ve had so much to say about this MSc program, and I interrupted you when you were gonna tell us about your vision of how this interacts with your textbooks.

Mike: Yeah. Thank you I’m Michael Obiero a teacher at Maseno University. Recently, one of the directors of INNODEMS, that’s a partner company to IDEMS International. And yes, David rudely interrupted me when I wanted to talk about the textbook project [laughs]. But it is something that I’m extremely passionate about and it’s born out of the government adopting the new competency-based [00:01:00] education that started just over two years ago.

David: It actually started in secondary school a couple of years ago. It’s gone all the way from primary, so it’s been almost 10 years now.

Mike: Yeah, so it’s now catching up with the junior secondary, I think in junior secondary it’s been over two and a half years, but it started well over, it should be nine years ago to be exact. So it’s to do with the teaching and learning resources that students have access to. And we feel that the textbooks that students have need a lot of improvement to make them ideal or at least make them extremely useful for students. 

David: Can I interrupt here again? ’cause we have had an episode previously on the textbooks themselves, and one of the things you mentioned there is this idea that it is this digital aspect of the textbook, which is the really original bit, that most textbooks in Kenya are still static textbooks. If they have a digital component, it’s a PDF, it isn’t interactive.[00:02:00] 

Mike: Yes. I was just getting to explaining about the textbook itself. So we have the print textbooks, which the government procures for every school and every student is supposed to have a textbook. So these have static exercises and if you have a digital version, it’s just a PDF of the same books.

So we are envisioning a digital textbook, which is interactive, in the sense that students can interact with exercises, get feedback on the exercises that will help them improve their work. So this is to compliment the work of the teacher. I’ve been a student in the public education system all my life in Kenya, and I know that teachers are sometimes extremely overwhelmed.

An average load for a teacher in a Kenyan school is, in junior high school, you’ll have one math teacher teaching three classes. That’s grade seven, eight, and nine. And each grade will have about 50 students [00:03:00] across the school. And math classes are there every day, which means every day you’re giving some form of a new concept.

And the way math is learned, at least the way I envision math to be learned is through practice. And students practice with the exercises. Teachers don’t have the capacity to mark and give feedback that will help students revise this work. So this is where we envisioned the idea of a digital textbook with digital exercise assignments or activities that students can interact with, get immediate feedback that can help them make progress.

So you learn from either your mistakes, you get hints or directions on how to correct mistakes if you met them or you just get feedback on what you’ve done if it’s correct, then you can make progress.

Another motivation is to leverage on the [00:04:00] government’s initiative of getting tablets into schools. So this is something that was started by the previous regime where they wanted every kid to have a tablet in primary school, and now junior high school is part of the primary school. So most schools have tablets in some form. Some of them are working, some of them are not. But we want to leverage on having those tablets, having these resources in those tablets, and kids actually interacting with them.

I’ve had discussions with the junior secretary and math teachers and they’re of the opinion that it’ll be an extremely valuable tool to have, especially on the marking aspect. They’ll want to give assignments to students on a regular basis, but the problem is marking. Keeping up is a very difficult thing to do. So this is another advantage of having the digital textbook to assist not just the students in the revision, but also assist the teachers in the teaching process.

David: [00:05:00] And let me just be clear here. This sounds very familiar to what you’ve done yourself for your undergraduate teaching.

Mike: Yes. In my undergraduate teaching I have big classes. And big classes is anywhere between 700 and 1200. I’m the only person teaching and I need to give regular assignments, and there’s no way you can mark a thousand assignments every week and give meaningful feedback. So we’ve used a technology called STACK, the System for Teaching and Assessment using Computer Algebra Kernels.

It was developed by a very good friend of mine, professor Chris Sangwin, at Edinburgh. And he’s been very supportive of us, the African community, in using this technology to develop teaching and assessment resources for our students. And we’ve heard data that shows that students appreciate having this resource in the learning of mathematics.

[00:06:00] We wanted to at least use the resource we have, which is STACK among others, to give automated as assessments in high school context.

David: When you say amongst others, and I know a little bit of the history because this emerged from a workshop given by the American Institute of Mathematics in Kenya. In fact, it’s their first ever African based workshop, and it was on these open educational resources and these systems, and STACK was there and PreText was represented.

Mike: Yes.

David: And you are the first people bringing STACK and PreText together. PreText is a system for authoring textbooks and STACK is the system for electronic assessment. There are other systems for electronic assessment, WebWork, which you are also using and so on, but STACK is particularly powerful, it’s really world leading.

Mike: Yeah.

David: And you are the [00:07:00] first people actually bringing these technologies together, these open technologies together, to be able to produce this type of interactive textbook. And the fact that you are doing this at the school level to start, and I know you have visions for now bringing this back into universities and all sorts of other things, but you are starting with this immediate challenge of the CBC curriculum.

And you mentioned your role in INNODEMS, which if I understand it, then once this open textbook exists and it’s on the tablets in schools, then the whole point is you now need to have a learning management system and that approach so that teachers can interact with this. And there are tools out there that do this, but there’s no tool which is adapted to your context and suited to the environment you are building and totally open.

And this is what INNODEMS is now really driving the development of, and it’s one of the reasons you’ve [00:08:00] joined as a director.

Mike: I’m happy you mentioned the AIM workshop that was in Kenya last year. I really thank the format of the AIM workshop because it was not really about learning a particular concept, but different brains and ideas coming together to conceptualize actionable projects.

And I remember having a team from pretext, we had a team of people from WebWork, we had a team from STACK, we had the math lecturers, we had math educators, we were just discussing different challenges and opportunities. And I think this is where this idea came up that we can actually develop textbooks which even in print format will be a huge improvement on the print textbooks we have, but we can go a step further and have the digital assessments.

You mentioned WebWork. WebWork, again, is a system of developing questions, math questions that are digitally marked, [00:09:00] but from experience I’m of the opinion that STACK is a much superior tool. And that’s why we are really looking forward to having STACK because there are some features of STACK which WebWork doesn’t have, and the textbooks will benefit a great deal with having those features, especially the interactive aspect of the activities that we are designing.

If you think about a geometry class, or a geometry lesson, you want activities that students can interact with. Whether it’s drawing geometric shapes, playing around with angles, playing around with the lengths of different geometric objects, running simulations. This is something that STACK can do.

David: What you are actually saying is STACK integrates both JSX Graph and GeoGebra into its questions in ways which are extremely powerful. Actually, PreText already integrates GeoGebra I believe, and so there are [00:10:00] elements of things that can be done. But STACK is, as you say, WebWork is a fantastic system, its main real value, which I believe you’ve already used, is its huge question banks. It has these amazing question banks, so you are not needing to write everything from scratch. But the actual functionality within STACK is a few steps further. It’s world leading, it is at the forefront of what is possible in the world.

Let me just come back to one other thing because the previous episodes that we’ve recently done on the MSc program and I don’t think we mentioned, that it was really at that same workshop, the same AIM workshop, that the Open University stood up and said, we’re taking this, we’re gonna make this MSc program happen. Full credit to AIM on actually this initiative to make this happen, and the impacts that are coming out of it are just huge.

We can see how this would not have happened, the MSc program wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for that AIM workshop. The [00:11:00] textbook wouldn’t be happening if it wasn’t for that AIM workshop. The innovations in STACK and PreText to allow this integration wouldn’t be happening if it wasn’t for that AIM workshop. And these are all big, these are big deals. This is technology development. This is, postgraduate degree development. This is textbook development for schools. And what’s so exciting to me is how you’ve integrated all of this.

And I want to come back to where we left off and where I interrupted you when we were discussing this within the context of the degree, because the statement you were making is that what you are wanting is the master students who are going through this degree program then become contributors to the textbook.

Mike: I think that would be one of the most powerful aspect of the textbook, because, in the long term, my vision is for the [00:12:00] teachers to be the main developers of the textbook. What I mean is that of course we have a team which is developing the initial version of the textbook, but this version will go through rigorous and continuous improvement process and this process will be dependent on teachers who are the users, students who are the consumers. And so we’ll need this information to improve the textbook.

And talking to the team from Ghana, we are thinking of not just having a Kenyan textbook, but a Ghana textbook as well. But the point is that if teachers are main reviewers of the textbook. And you look at it like you are teacher who is teaching say grade seven, you have a textbook you are using, there are aspects you feel you need to use to teach, which are not captured in the book. You have an opportunity to [00:13:00] highlight that through the review process, you can give a review comment saying that you need this section to be improved or this aspect to be added to the section. And by doing so, you are main contributor of the book. And in so doing, teachers become owners of the textbook.

So my main vision is for teachers to take the ownership of the books. They’ll be the main developers, in quotes, of the book. And the way this fits with the MSc program is that we want teachers to develop the tools for teaching. You can envision how a given topic can be presented interactively in different ways. Obviously the teachers will not initially have the expertise to write the textbook, but the comments they give will be instrumental in improving the book.

So if you think of an [00:14:00] innovative way in which a given section can be given interactively to students, you can communicate those thoughts to the people who are doing the actual authoring and they can implement. And this can contribute to your MSc program because you’ve contributed to knowledge, you’ve improved the textbook, you are part of the ownership of the textbook.

And I think at some point I had a discussion with you about how do we actually acknowledge that someone has contributed. And I remember you mentioning that you can have the last page where you have the list of all contributors and a link to the actual contributions. A teacher can say, okay, I contributed this innovative way of teaching geometry in grade seven and they actually link the contribution they made.

And you document this nicely and this goes towards your MSc degree or project on contributing to development of open [00:15:00] education resources. So you’ve contributed to the textbook you’re using while at the same time it has helped you to get your degree. So this brings the marriage between the textbook and the MSc program.

David: It’s an incredible vision, and I want to articulate that, this vision is beautiful and really I love it, but we have to confess it’s not totally original because I know you and I have both heard about the SMP project, the School of Mathematics Project from about the 1960s or seventies led out of Southampton, and we’ve actually interacted with the people who are now custodians of this.

But this is very much the approach that they took to develop that textbook. And it was all this intertwining the teacher capacity building with the development of the textbook, with the big difference being the technologies that are now available, which enables this to happen with open textbooks rather than tied to a publisher [00:16:00] and therefore limited in its scope with the abilities for these different variants to enable cross country variants, to enable people to have variants, maybe even for their own school or their own region in the future. Who knows? 

This is what’s so exciting to imagine. It really is mind blowing.

Mike: And we have a challenge in Kenya. And I think the same is true for other countries, at least my discussion with the GHAIDEMS team, they have the same challenge in Ghana, where the publishers are like gatekeepers to the textbooks that goes into schools. And, there’s a lot of bureaucracy that goes into development of textbooks. And we feel that this is where the content is lacking because it’s about now profits are not developing a good tool.

David: Let’s be fair here. That gatekeeping you are talking about is all about printed textbooks. You need gatekeeping for printed textbooks because you can only have [00:17:00] certain number of textbooks distributed. But what you are talking about now is opening the floodgates because you are not talking about just printed textbooks, you are talking about digital textbooks. And digital textbooks can be much more widely available.

Mike: I think I wanted to bring the idea of why we feel digital textbooks are the way to go. Because of the gatekeeping, there’s not the same emphasis on content that needs to go into development of textbooks. And another advantage of the digital textbook is that we want to design a continuous review process. So we are going to be having continuous new versions of the book. And this is something that can be extremely expensive if you want to be having like periodic editions of a book.

And again, this allows multiple contributors to the book. So we want to open the space to teachers to be able to contribute. We want to be in a position to continually have new [00:18:00] editions of the book. And this is something that can be done without any additional cost if it’s a digital textbook than if it’s a print textbook. So this is the most powerful aspect of the book that we feel makes it superior to the print textbooks.

David: There’s a number of different advantages of your digital textbook approach. The thing which I want to draw out of what you are saying is that there is, and I don’t want to criticize the gatekeeping aspect because there is good reasons for quality, for processes, for government control, for all sorts of things, there’s good reasons why when you have a printed textbook approach, you do need to have good publishers who are assuring quality, who have their set up processes.

And correct me if I’m wrong but you would be delighted to work with publishers in the future to be able to say what would it look like if the digital versions had printed equivalents, which got distributed at scale with maybe QR codes linking to the [00:19:00] digital resources?

So you could do your assessments statically in the textbook, or you can follow a QR code and bam, you get your interactive exercises with randomization and mastery so that you can practice to your heart’s content. 

Mike: Yeah. I don’t want to be overly critical of the gatekeeping. I think my frustration is it just makes it so difficult for a new contributor who wants to contribute. But again, you are absolutely right that having some of these well-established publishing houses is good for control, that you’ll be sure that they want something of quality to be published. 

David: Yeah, their reputation is at stake. They can’t afford for something which isn’t of a good enough quality to go out with their name on it.

Mike: I think my frustration is about the bureaucracy that goes into it, because I’m just someone new coming up with a new idea and having learned that, oh, there’s all this process that you have to go through. 

David: Well, when you say you are someone [00:20:00] new, this is where, you know, you are right, you are a driver of this idea, but this is an idea which has come out of the Kenya Math Society. This multitude of partners, in different ways are seeing the need of recognizing that with the competency-based curriculum, there is a problem and there is a collection of experts who can contribute to innovation, which might be useful.

So the fact that you are a new party to publishing, that’s not your expertise. You are an academic. You don’t wanna become a publisher, you are just recognizing that there is a need that you, with your academic expertise can contribute. And this is something which I think is just, the way you are approaching this is really inspiring.

I want to finish with coming back to this interplay because it’s the part which I see as being most exciting.

Mike: Yeah.

David: This idea that the education, the [00:21:00] postgraduate education is what can create the talent, the skills that are needed to be able to become the contributors to these open projects. This is this potentially hugely symbiotic system where no commercial textbook can compete with that manpower. Because you are by definition, getting the next generation of talent to be all contributing and thinking together. Somebody’s whole thesis could be based on a small component, and that’s fine because you’ve got lots of different people taking on the different components.

This is where research and the academic side of postgraduate education can be really serving these open products in a way which is impossible to compete against. And this is what I feel is so exciting [00:22:00] about your approach that the quality of that textbook, not when it first comes out, but over time should be incomparable.

And so therefore, what you really want is you want that inspired publisher who comes along and says, I recognize this quality. I recognize I don’t want to compete, I want to collaborate. And actually being able to actually have publishers collaborating on this, maybe they have their own variants, their own versions, they have their own authors who put their own style, who make decisions about what to include and what not to include, but who build from the open content you’re creating.

That would be where I think this would be really exceptional and it could be transformative for the proper publishers, and it could help them as well, because they can get better quality coming out in a way, which I think is win-win for everyone. Because your aim is not to become a publisher. You want to collaborate with the [00:23:00] publishers, you want to work with the publishers and people to be able to do this. And this is the incredible mix, which I think is possible with the approaches you’re taking.

Mike: Just something to add on. Obviously we are leveraging on teachers themselves being the main reviewers. So you are getting thousands and thousands of reviewers of a book, which you cannot get in the traditional setup or in the current setup. Then you have it feeding into the postgraduate program if teachers want to do that.

And I look at it again as a motivation for teachers to take the postgraduate program because you’ll have a teacher who has taken it and written a project or a thesis and said, okay, this is my project, my contribution was on the textbook, which I’m using to teach, and I have an MSc out of this. And, through the teacher’s forums, they’re like, oh, I’ve been contributing to the textbook. Maybe I can also do an MSc and have a project linked to the contributions I’m making in different [00:24:00] ways.

Also I feel that teachers having that ownership of the textbook is powerful in the sense that they feel that we are using a tool that we are part of the process in creating it. And if I feel that there’s something I need to be added I can do that quite easily through giving a review comment. And if that comment is implemented, then there’s a real ownership of the book. And so if more and more teachers feel part of the ownership of the book, then, it’s a self selling strategy for us that someone will be more likely to use something that they’ve developed themselves than something they’ve been given just to use. So we are using that also as a main strategy for marketing the books or just advertising the book to be used by teachers and students.

I know we’re running out of time but I just wanted to mention that [00:25:00] it’s not just about teachers, it’s also about parents. A parent will want their child to practice on math because that’s where we are starting from. We might move into other STEM subjects. But say a parent wants to monitor their child’s practice in math, then they have an opportunity with the digital textbook, which they can give the children through their phones and through the user data, they can monitor how their kids are doing.

Or even math tutors who might be teachers or might not be teachers. So it’s not just a tool for teachers, but there are other people can use it from parents to tutors to students themselves.

David: It’s a beautiful vision and I want to just come back on a few of these points. The point about parents is critical because the competency-based curriculum is aiming to engage parents in the child’s education as a central pillar in some sense. So that’s a really important component and the opportunities that come around there are exciting.

And you mentioned math tutors, and we know that [00:26:00] within urban centers in Kenya, they have an increasing number of math tutors. Middle class families, one of the first things you do is you get a math tutor. And one of the reasons for this is, and you mentioned starting with maths and maybe moving to other STEM subjects, it is documented. In fact, our colleague Zach did his MSc finding the main reason students don’t proceed with their education in any discipline is because of mathematics, mathematics is the barrier subject. 

And this is something where that recognition of, if you can remove the mathematics barrier, which is why math tutors are so popular, if you can remove that mathematics barrier for children, they tend to thrive. And this is something where starting there is a perfect place to start, it’s a great vision.

There’s a number of things you’ve stated as if they are, and I know it is just that you can already see [00:27:00] what they will be. I really hope this vision will come to, will really come to be. I think a lot of the pieces are coming together. It’s a really exciting vision.

I guess the last thing that I’d like to ask you is, okay, we’ve got this really exciting vision for the MSc program. The textbooks together, the idea that in some sense through the MSc program, we’re creating this generation who are engaged in research in sensible ways. But once you’ve got people through an MSc, what’s next?

Mike: Different things. One, there’s the obvious, someone will want to proceed to their PhD which is something very natural in the Kenya context, because most people want to be lecturers like myself. I need a PhD for that. So most people want to proceed with a PhD. And we are also thinking about a PhD program in [00:28:00] mathematics innovation, so that’s something which we have ideas about. We’ve not really put them on paper, but we have those ideas.

And, again, will be informed by the need after the MSc program, but we hope that in the next two years or so once the first few graduates of the MSc program are graduating, we will have a PhD program in place for that.

Another possible direction. And you alluded to this if you think about the MSc program, we have different pathways. So you might have an MSc say focusing on education, and you’ll say, okay, I want to add myself some skills in data. So you might go back and do programs or courses leading to the data pathway.

And again, there are micro certifications in this. You might just want a diploma in that pathway or you might want to go the way and do an MSc. Or people might just [00:29:00] be content with the skills they’ve got and work towards sharpening those skills at their places of work.

So there are different directions this can go. Again, I’ll have to talk to the interested people, try to figure out, now, if you take this MSc program you are done with it. What do you want to do next? Can we make that happen? The Open University is a very willing partner, they’re open, very open to ideas and implementing things with them is much, much easier because they’re very open to people thinking out of the box, which is not the case with the most of the traditional universities we have.

So there are different ways this can go and I hope that IDEMS and INNODEMS will be, again, willing partners in this journey. I’ve been lucky in the sense that I’ve been able to do most of the things I do because of support I get from different organizations and different people. And I think at some point you are mentioning that I [00:30:00] was getting free resources when people are contributing to support in mentoring some of my interns, they are doing this at their own time, which could be very expensive.

I think I’ll work on trying to convince even more people to partner with the Open University to partner with INNODEMS, partner with IDEMS to actualize some of the things we are doing because these are very big projects. They are not projects you can complete in a year or two. Some of them will go even more than 10 years.

Like for the textbook, getting to the gold standard, might take something like six or seven years or more to get to the gold standard. Because eventually we want to get to a point where we have some of the world renowned book publishers giving their comments and just shaping the book into a leading textbook. So that can be for the Kenyan textbooks can be for the generic textbook. But the goal is to get the gold standard, the world leading textbook for that particular [00:31:00] curriculum. 

David: Let me just summarize what I’ve heard. What I’ve heard is that you are not only thinking about the MSc program, but you are thinking about ongoing continual development for teachers who would take the individual micro courses. 

You are thinking about the fact that you actually want to design a new, innovative doctorate program, which then complements and takes further these ideas to really develop those educators into the world leading academics of the future.

Mike: Yes.

David: And you are talking about the fact that you don’t just want your Open Kenyan textbook to be a leading Kenyan textbook. You want it to become a world leading textbook.

Mike: Absolutely. Yes.

David: I love your ambition and I hope we can support you along the way. The final thing I’d like to say is I’ve heard a lot about Open University and how you’re supporting it and its value, but I’m also aware that you are also within Maseno University pushing a number of these initiatives and a number of these ideas within the [00:32:00] current structures. 

And that combination, ’cause I believe you had an opportunity to leave Maseno and go to the Open University, and you decided to stay at Maseno. And so this idea of actually being bridging as you are between different institutions, developing your home institution, developing the Open University, serving on the Kenyan Math society, and with these amazing ambitions. It’s exciting and I wish you all the best.

Mike: Thank you so much. Really enjoyable discussion and I look forward to even more discussions.

David: Thank you, Mike.