185 – Enabling Access to STACK through PreTeXt

[00:00:07] Santiago: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I’m Santiago Borio, currently, still a collaborator with IDEMS, and I am here with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS.

Hi David.

[00:00:21] David: Hi Santiago. I saw you hesitating there because of course, very soon you’ll be a Impact Activation Fellow again.

[00:00:29] Santiago: Yeah, it looks like in three weeks time I should resume that fellowship after a long leave.

[00:00:36] David: Maternity leave, not yours, but your cover.

[00:00:40] Santiago: Yes, and health leave as well.

I’m very keen to hear from you what’s going on STACK wise, specifically motivated by what happened last week at the time of recording in Ethiopia.

[00:00:58] David: Absolutely. I’m still excited about this. It’s always, stimulating is the best word I can have to go and work with our colleagues in Ethiopia. I’ve been working with Bahir Dar University and the maths department there for getting on 15 years now. I think we figured it is 14 years at the moment. And this latest visit was for the African STACK Conference. And to have that event in Ethiopia was just fantastic.

One of the things which came out is that, really, we need to be thinking of different models to help scale and to help people access the STACK work that’s been happening. And PreText, which I don’t know how much we’ve discussed on these episodes in the past, but which is this authoring system for textbooks, the integration of STACK, this electronic assessment system, into PreText was a game changer for many in the audience and many who are interested in using these technologies.

And so this has really got me thinking about, well, how can we be enabling students or educators or institutions to access and take advantage of these open technologies.

[00:02:27] Santiago: Okay, let me take a step back and explain partly the challenge of accessing STACK, and maybe you can correct me afterwards, but, currently, unless you have some very technical people in your institution or you are very technical yourself, in order to access any STACK materials you need to have a Moodle learning management system set up with STACK installed, and that’s not an easy feat at all.

[00:03:03] David: Well, what’s so interesting is you are correct, but Bahir Dar has a Moodle learning management system with STACK installed and that wasn’t enough. So what we found was that there is another thing you have to have, which is a system for enrolling students and engaging staff and creating resources within that Moodle. Because what was interesting in Bahir Dar is they already have that learning management system, and the problem was that they don’t automatically enroll students when they join the university, and therefore there’s an additional barrier to getting set up, which the department or the lecturer needs to go through, which in some of their courses, the courses that need it the most, the ones with thousands of students, actually, are insurmountable.

And so, while you are absolutely right, that is necessary, that wasn’t the barrier that was holding things back. And this was so interesting to find out.

[00:04:14] Santiago: In fact, a few years ago we tried to set up servers for the whole of Ethiopia, for any university wanting to use them, to just either send a list of students or use directly themselves. And that did not work out, there were too many barriers, too many administrative and security and privacy issues.

[00:04:40] David: Well, I think the security and the privacy issues, those can be resolved. And I think what is interesting is that the issue that we faced I think before was we were trying to do it at the institution level. And that was the wrong level. We need to be able to do things at the lecturer level or at the student level.

The student level is not possible within the learning management system. This is what the textbooks make possible. But the lecturer level is going to be an interesting one. And really what I believe is that we can make real progress by enabling individual lecturers to take the initiative. Now, even that is problematic.

The key thing which I’ve taken away from this is to resolve this problem we need to be able to work at the student level, at the lecturer level, or at the institution level. Now, of course the desirable result is to work at the institution level, but that brings complication.

And so actually enabling lecturers to build the bank of evidence based on other means, and supporting that, and enabling students to access the resources independent of whether their lecturers have chosen to do so, those are the two levels which I think came out of the conference as being enablers for us to be thinking about much more seriously.

[00:06:20] Santiago: How is that enabling happening?

[00:06:23] David: So right now what happened in the conference was that during the workshop sessions, a textbook was authored for students on the basic maths course in Ethiopia, which embedded the STACK questions.

[00:06:42] Santiago: And just for a bit of context, the Basic Maths course is a compulsory course for every single student joining university in Ethiopia in any university.

[00:06:51] David: And in any subject, except that there are two of them. There’s the basic maths for natural sciences and the basic maths for social sciences. These courses are given at slightly different times to different students. But between them there is a compulsory basic math course for every student.

[00:07:10] Santiago: Yeah, so it’s potentially hundreds of thousands of students?

[00:07:14] David: Well, more than that. I believe, and I didn’t realise this until last week, I believe this course is also used as part of the criteria for students to then choose what they go on to study in their second year.

[00:07:31] Santiago: Of course, because the first year is more general, and then you specialise from the second year.

[00:07:38] David: Exactly. And the basic maths course is part of the criteria which are used to enable students to choose their subjects.

[00:07:46] Santiago: So it’s quite high stakes course.

[00:07:49] David: I didn’t realise this until last week, but yes, it’s a high stakes course, as I understand it.

[00:07:55] Santiago: And in one week you managed to produce a draft textbook for it.

[00:08:02] David: Well, the draft, the PDF textbook already existed. So what we managed to do was to take the existing PDF and turn it into an interactive textbook by changing the technology to PreText and integrating STACK questions. Now, this is at the moment, of course, only a draft, and the point is this needs to be owned by the Ethiopian lecturers. But they’re the ones who are doing a lot of the work on this. This is great.

We’re supporting them to take this on and do it. And there was this real sense that this is, this is important. There’s a question about whether they’re trying to do the natural science one, which starts in September, or whether they’re gonna focus on the social science one, which starts next January. But there was a real sense that this is something that they as a combined effort wanted to engage in.

[00:08:57] Santiago: When you say lecturers, it wasn’t just lecturers from one university, was it?

[00:09:01] David: There were 11, I think 10 or 11 Ethiopian universities present. And actually what was surprising to me is some of the key driving forces were actually from Addis, which is of course the oldest and most established university. I believe it’s still the only autonomous university.

[00:09:19] Santiago: And in some ways the most influential university in terms of setting trends and adopting new ideas and techniques that other universities then try to follow?

[00:09:32] David: Maybe, I don’t know. I mean, this is where Bahir Dar itself might claim that title. You know, Addis has always considered itself sort of above everyone else. Whereas Bahir Dar has often been the university that others follow. Now, of course, Addis is the biggest, most established Ethiopian University and everybody recognises that. But they consider themselves, for them, postgraduate education is more important in some ways than undergraduate education, they see themselves as having a different role to many other Ethiopian universities. I honestly don’t know if they see themselves as being the influencer.

But what was very interesting to me is in this particular case, we had some fantastic lecturers from Addis who were engaged in this process and who really took this on and said, we’re gonna make sure this works. And I think that was so important for the Bahir Dar colleagues because I think a lot of the weight they felt was falling on them, and this actually is certainly a shared effort now.

I think before, when Addis wasn’t on board, a lot of the other universities were looking to Bahir Dar to lead. Whereas with Addis on board, I think it is more clearly a collaborative effort.

[00:10:52] Santiago: Great. And it sounds like a good symbiotic relationship there.

[00:10:58] David: We hope.

[00:11:00] Santiago: Yes, of course we hope.

You had a couple of episodes with Mike Obiero and with Zach Mbasu on the textbooks themselves. They were more focused on Kenya and school level textbooks. We discussed a bit these basic math course, there is this textbook that we have a draft in PreText. There’s also been work on the Kenyan textbook for schools.

Since I rejoined IDEMS recently and I’m still transitioning in, I’ve been really impressed with the work that has been done on the textbooks, but there has been a big push to integrate STACK into it, and this could be an entryway for school students to use STACK.

[00:11:54] David: Absolutely, and let me be clear, the STACK PreText integration is brand new. It’s something which a year ago was an idea and has only recently in the last few months become a reality.

[00:12:09] Santiago: And we had, IDEMS had a role in that integration didn’t it?

[00:12:14] David: Well, the key developer is Georg, who’s part of our team. And he has been working with the PreText and the STACK teams to pull this together. So yes, we’ve essentially been the ones to pull it together, with support from both the STACK developers and the PreText developers.

[00:12:32] Santiago: Who are both keen to get each package integrated.

[00:12:36] David: Absolutely, and, well, when you say keen, they are now keen, which is great. But it’s taken 10 years of me actually nagging, particularly every time I’ve discussed with the PreText guys, I said, you know, I need STACK integrated, I need STACK integrated. And it is great that they are now really on board and interested.

[00:13:04] Santiago: Was PreText the one that a colleague of yours developed from one year to the next, because you mentioned the need.

[00:13:13] David: Sort of, there’s more to it than that. But yes, there’s a guy called Rob Beezer who has done some fantastic work. He’s really the key thinker behind PreText, and when we first met, we were teaching together in AIMS South Africa, he was teaching one course and I was teaching the other. And he was the author of this amazing linear algebra textbook.

And I said, I love your linear algebra textbook, but I can’t use it with my students in Kenya. And he said, why not? And I said, because it’s too heavy, they just can’t access the internet like that, and so on. And from one year to the next, we both taught the same courses again the following year, and he said, you know, I’ve done it. And I said, what have you done? I’ve totally rewritten it so now your students could use it.

And indeed, he had lightened the load, he’d got it down to what was needed and so on. And then he went off and developed PreText after that. So after having done that change, he then PreText became his big project. And part of that was this idea that we had been discussing that in the Kenyan context I needed it to be published in different ways.

And so PreText’s great strength is that it enables you to publish the same content which you authored once in multiple formats, as a printable book, as a PDF, as a interactive textbook, in a Jupiter notebook, in brail, you know, all these different things with the same source code, same authoring.

[00:14:50] Santiago: And I think it’s really worth pointing out that it’s open source as well.

[00:14:55] David: Absolutely, it is open source, it’s a fantastic project, great credit to not just Rob, but there’s a whole team behind it now, at what they’ve built. And it’s now been over a decade and it’s matured, it really has. And so using it now is a rather different experience than a few years ago.

[00:15:14] Santiago: Great. And being open source, and STACK being open source is what can really make this popularisation, accessibility aspect, of this educational content that we’ve been creating for, well now, since 2018.

[00:15:35] David: Yeah.

[00:15:36] Santiago: And it can really give access, real access to people, it still requires internet connection to have that…

[00:15:45] David: For now. I, of course, have an ambition that I believe then we should be able to publish into our Open App Builder, and that should be possible once we can then embed things like Maxima to enable that system to actually display the questions.

[00:16:02] Santiago: And of course there’s always a possibility of setting up an offline, sort of product in a portable machine like Raspberry Pi or the like.

[00:16:14] David: Absolutely. An intranet based solution is absolutely possible, and that’s something which is already there. But I want a system which works within your phone and being able to publish these interactive exercises to your phone. That’s a whole nother level, and I think it’s achievable.

[00:16:32] Santiago: Great.

So it’s very exciting. It sounds like a rather successful conference, we focused very much on the workshop, but there were real outputs from the conference that could have direct impact in thousands, tens of thousands potentially, people.

[00:16:52] David: And that’s just looking at the Ethiopian impacts. There were about 10 or 11 countries represented, and that included Somalia and South Sudan, which are particularly interesting for me because these are even more challenging environments than I’m used to working in. And so those universities are facing some very interesting challenges.

And in their context, you know, there’s the real possibility for innovation because they’re facing challenges that make Ethiopia look easy, and Kenya. There was also a collaborator from Cameroon, which was very exciting because that’s potentially a gateway into Francophone Africa, Cameroon being a bilingual country and having very similar curriculum to many of the Francophone countries. This was a big deal and there were a lot of interesting elements to this conference.

[00:17:48] Santiago: Great. Sounds like a really exciting week, last week. And, as I said at the beginning, I’m transitioning back into IDEMS and, as I transition back, perhaps we could delve into a bit more the details of this textbook project as it progresses in new episodes of the podcast.

[00:18:11] David: Absolutely.

Maybe the last thing I’ll finish with is that the reason the textbook piece is so important in this is because this is what means we could get something directly to student, and this is where of course, the long-term work means we need to integrate that into the institutional solutions.

But that’s not so difficult once we actually have something in students’ hands, which is helping them to learn to engage, and where all they need access to is a phone to be able to engage.

[00:18:50] Santiago: That sounds great, quite ambitious, still a lot of development to be done, I understand.

[00:18:58] David: Absolutely. But it’ll get there, and it is been a long time coming, as you sort of say, since 2018, the progress we’ve made is huge.

[00:19:08] Santiago: Yes. Would be good to have perhaps a mini series on our history with STACK.

[00:19:16] David: Sounds fun.

[00:19:17] Santiago: Yeah, let’s get that done.

[00:19:20] David: Thank you.

[00:19:22] Santiago: Thank you, David.

[00:19:23] David: And welcome back, or almost welcome back, however you see it.

[00:19:27] Santiago: Yeah, you’ll welcome me back properly when I formally join again.

[00:19:33] David: I look forward to it.