238 – Open Textbooks and Beyond

[00:00:07] Santiago: Hi, and welcome to the IDEMS podcast. I am Santiago Borio, an Impact Activation Fellow, and I’m here with David Stern, one of the founding directors of IDEMS.

Hi David.

[00:00:17] David: Hi, Santiago. I’m looking forward to another discussion. Are we talking about textbooks again?

[00:00:23] Santiago: We are talking about textbooks. I’m not sure if we talked specifically about the textbooks we’re working on before, so I’m very excited to be discussing this because it’s been, forgive my honesty, a mad rush for the last two weeks.

[00:00:41] David: And this is why, as the listeners will be aware, we’ve had a lot of textbook episodes recently, I’ve talked to Mike about them, I’m talking to Lily, to Lucie, all sorts of people. Textbooks is the flavour of the week. At the moment, well, more than just the week.

[00:00:55] Santiago: Yes. And perhaps it’s worth spending a little bit of time explaining one of the reasons why we have been rushing and sprinting so much to get this, which I believe was alluded to in the episode with Mike. But for the first time, and this is quite exciting, we’ve been trying to get this, we do have support or at least interest from the Kenyan Ministry of Education and other formal…

[00:01:27] David: CEMASTEA in particular, which is one of the training institutes. And we’ve been working with them for years and we’ve known people in the ministry for years and they like our work, and this has been long term collaborations. But it’s always political and there’s issues around that. And what has happened right now, very recently, this last few days, which will of course be a bit further back once people are listening to this, is that the issues surrounding grade 10 maths teachers is acute enough that we are not the only people scrambling for solutions.

The solution that Mike and his team at INNODEMS have come forward is getting a lot of attention as being something which CEMASTEA might want to make their own, and the ministry might want to really make their own. And of course, because what we’re developing is open, it’s absolutely possible for them to do so.

[00:02:29] Santiago: Two points, Mike and his team is also Zach and his team, both of them are the project leads for this. So let’s give credit where credit is due.

[00:02:40] David: I mean, Mike and Zach have been working hand in hand on this in different ways, playing different roles. I think that it is fair to say that the textbook initiative, Mike has been the driving force, but Zach is now fully engaged, and of course Zach is the driving force behind INNODEMS, and that’s been the central pillar on which this is getting built. So it is the two of them, as you say, and you are right to pull me up on that.

[00:03:03] Santiago: And the second point, what I find particularly exciting about these formal bodies, the Ministry of Education and CEMASTEA getting interested in what we’re doing is that it’s potentially going to help scale this quite substantially.

[00:03:24] David: Let’s be clear, CEMASTEA is the group that has the national mandate for training teachers during this transition for the science and technology subjects, including mathematics. And so at this point in time, they are asking themselves, what can we do to support teachers, and they have seen the work that Mike and Zach have been doing.

And it’s really interesting that the only criticism which has come back so far is, well, we need the whole of the grade 10 curriculum to be covered. And Zach and the team are working away and probably this will be achieved within a few days now. And so this is something where that process is really ongoing, it’s something where the resources are there, it is just a question of putting it into the formats where we now have the sequence of courses for all of the different topics all the way through the year lined up, ready to go.

And these are courses that then CEMASTEA and the ministry can take ownership of. And because everything’s open, whether INNODEMS delivers them, IDEMS is involved, or whether they get taken up, it doesn’t matter. We want to see teachers supported, and we believe that this will provide a layer of support that will really help in the current moment, which we’ve articulated in other episodes, why it’s such an interesting moment in Kenya.

[00:04:50] Santiago: Indeed. And you alluded to some of the technical aspects, which is really what I want to focus a bit more on.

We initially started working on a PreTeXt book, a textbook, an online textbook for all the grades in Kenya. The need and the importance of grade 10 came up and we focused a bit more on the grade 10, and it’s gone a bit beyond just a standard PreTeXt book. We’ve worked, as I believe has been mentioned in previous episodes on the STACK integration into PreTeXt, and we have STACK questions in the PreTeXt book. So those are two of the main technologies that we are using for the resources.

[00:05:40] David: Just to sort of come in, I’ve mentioned this in other episodes and it’s come up in other places, PreTeXt is a semantic language, which means that in particular, it deals with multiple variants of the textbook, and that’s really important, and that’s something which we believe is essential for this really serving teachers. We already have variants which relate to the teacher’s variant or the student’s variant, but there’s going to be a whole raft of variants, which we imagine will get created over the next year or so.

[00:06:14] Santiago: And of course we have variants that address people with devices or without devices. So having a printable or offline version, and we have the online interactive version, I think that’s important to distinguish as well.

[00:06:29] David: Absolutely, and of course, within the teacher’s textbooks, there are then variants of the teacher’s guides, depending on whether their students have access to technology or not. And this is where you start to see the importance of variants. Teachers in Kenya, they’re in very different contexts. There are some schools which are extremely well equipped, where you have nice computer labs and people will be interacting with these resources on an individual basis, one-on-one student to the textbook. And you have other contexts where the teacher will be teaching students who don’t have access to devices or technology.

[00:07:02] Santiago: Maybe this is a topic for another podcast episode, you said one-on-one with the devices, I believe that two people or three for each device, in this context, could be more beneficial educationally speaking. But again, that’s another story.

[00:07:19] David: This is something we have discussed in previous episodes and something I absolutely agree, but the highest resource environments would be one laptop per child or one device per child. That’s what’s considered high resource environment, and those exist within Kenya. The ones where you actually have a number of students per device, they also exist. This whole spectrum exists.

[00:07:41] Santiago: Okay. You gave a description of PreTeXt and the value of it. Now, for completeness sake, can you give a brief description of STACK?

[00:07:51] David: We’ve got so many episodes on this, and my simple answer is gonna be, I’m not gonna do much because actually the STACK integration within the PreTeXt textbooks in Kenya at the moment is what I would call minimal. All the fancy features of STACK are not yet being used there because there hasn’t been the time to really flesh that out into the impressive things that this could be in the future.

The potential of STACK in this is immense. But what is amazing is it is already there serving the base functionality, which is mastery, enabling students to have mastery learning, and that’s what’s already in there.

[00:08:29] Santiago: Okay. Let me follow up on that, yes, I agree it’s minimal in Kenya, it’s very useful for mastery. But you haven’t mentioned what STACK is, so I’ll give it a go. STACK, in the simplest form, is a tool that allows to create interactive questions that provide carefully crafted personalised feedback.

[00:08:56] David: Absolutely. One of the things which is interesting, the reason I don’t want to dig into this is that I think it’s actually divisive at the moment. Many people are saying, but why are you doing that? You just use AI, and AI will give automated feedback in ways which are good, and this is a really big discussion. I don’t wanna get sidetracked by that.

But what I do want to say is that mastery, everybody recognises it is the launching point, the fact that STACK could become a deterministic core for a really impactful AI based interaction with the students, that’s part of what we’ve also done another recent episode on with Michele, so this is all part of the bigger visions. STACK itself is, I believe, an essential component.

But exactly as Michele highlighted in another recent episode, it is easily dismissed because of the advances in AI, which I think can distract us from the core of what’s happening in Kenya. And so I don’t want to get mixed up with these different things.

[00:10:00] Santiago: But as you did earlier, I want to distract a bit because what we’re doing is fantastic, but one of the things that I am hoping to be able to touch on this episode, if not we’ll do a follow up, is how all of this is also of great need in other environments, in high resource environments in the US, in the UK, and so on. And that is where I think it’s important to understand that STACK could play a much more prominent role.

[00:10:32] David: Absolutely. And STACK is already used across the world by multiple thousands of institutions, it’s really widely used, it’s extremely powerful. But the point I would like to then shift on is actually the other set of conversations I’ve been having in different episodes haven’t been about the Kenyan context.

They’ve been about data science, statistics, research methods, and the use of the same technologies in those environments. And in particular, and this is why I’m sort of honing in on the variants piece, the multiple variants is something which is a necessary challenge to navigate in all these environments. And actually in the statistics, data science context, there’s other episodes where we’ve dug into that because it is the big blocker.

In Kenya, that’s not the big blocker, the big blocker, the big need is coming because of this urgent need for this new curriculum with things around this. So they need the whole package. But there’s high resource environments related to data and statistics where just the variant piece is really important.

[00:11:41] Santiago: Okay. I’ll focus on Kenya from now on. Those are two technologies that we are using that are quite central, one minimal in Kenya, fair enough. And I think it’s worth pointing out again that they’re both open source technologies. And the third technology that we’re using, which is also open source, is Moodle, the learning management system.

And what we’re doing in Moodle is we are creating courses, two different types of courses. At the moment, we have only one of the first one, which is training, direct teacher development training. And that is very much related to the curriculum based education, and it has a little module on how to contribute to the further development of the resources so that the co-creation that you and Mike discussed extensively in the episode you had can be achieved. There’s actually training on how to contribute, how to create, and that I think is crucial and it’s wonderful and there’s more courses along those lines that will come in.

[00:13:02] David: It’s more exciting than that. We’ve just heard this last week that CUE, the certifying body for university education is actually reviewing the MSc course we are co-developing with the Open University, where one of the pathways is to get teachers to go through and do their MSc and be able to create these resources. This is something we have done an episode on the past, but yeah, it’s a really exciting, another stream of this.

[00:13:29] Santiago: Just to pick up on one detail, when you say the Open University, this is the Open University in Kenya, not what we know as the Open University, which is a British institution.

[00:13:40] David: Thank you. You’re absolutely right. The Open University of Kenya is Kenya’s youngest public university, and it’s just starting off. We’ve been asked to, and we’ve been co-developing this new master’s program, which I think it could be a flagship program for the Open University of Kenya.

And really is timely because these teachers who are teaching grade 10 right now, this is the master’s program for them. This is the thing which they could do, which would actually enable them to really learn how to do the competency-based curriculum well, and that ties in with that initial short training that you just mentioned, which is in collaboration with the Kenyan Maths Society, with INNODEMS, IDEMS, and is about those skills.

[00:14:21] Santiago: It’s worth pointing out that the master’s program has a module or will have a module specifically for teachers or for educators on this. And the other exciting thing about the master’s program is that it’s a way to encourage people who are in academia or wanting to be in academia to get involved in things like this, it’s a way of formalising it academically within the Open University of Kenya and it has all sorts of other benefits.

[00:14:57] David: Absolutely, and we’ve gotta be clear here. This is Mike who has real credit for this. We’ve had an episode in the past about this programme. He’s the one who’s driving this through, Beth from the Open University of Kenya is doing fantastic work actually making this happen. So it’s a real team effort, but it’s a lot of work.

[00:15:15] Santiago: And you are being modest here. Mike is the driving force at the moment, but this is one of your projects that you’ve had in your mind for many years.

[00:15:27] David: Over a decade. Yeah, I’m getting old. It’s been more than 15 years that we’ve been discussing this with Mike.

[00:15:34] Santiago: Okay, let’s get back to the different type of resources that we have, because I mentioned one type of Moodle course, which is a short course teacher training, and there’s more of those short courses to come that support teacher development and are in line with this project, the textbooks project.

We have another type of courses which are very interesting. So grade 10 is divided into three big sections, Numbers and Algebra, Geometry and Measurement, and Probability and Statistics, those are the main chapters, let’s say. There’s topic sections, and within each topic section we, well, when I say we, Zach mostly, has developed these lesson plans and step by step guides.

[00:16:33] David: It’s a team of three actually, let’s give them credit. Zach and two of his colleagues at INNODEMS have been working together on this, Zach is an experienced teacher, the other are relatively recently trained teachers, but they’re working together on developing these lesson plans.

[00:16:47] Santiago: And each subtopic has now, or we are getting towards, an individual course.

[00:16:57] David: No, no. Let’s be clear. So within the chapters, you have your three main chapters, you have topics. Each topic has its own course. And so within Numbers and Algebra, that’s three courses. One, which is on…

[00:17:14] Santiago: Real Numbers, Indices and Logarithms, and Quadratic Expressions and Equations.

[00:17:20] David: Exactly. And this is sort of saying that actually when people are teaching this, there is a course where they can co-develop, they can actually have peer to peer learning and so on. We are running late on this in some sense, the first course is open and there’s a few teachers that are engaging, but not much is happening.

The aim is now to have these then, which gets out to teachers, and this is why having the ministry and having CEMASTEA on board to give these courses, and they’re certified courses by the Kenyan Math Society and so on, these are going to then be things which we believe will support teachers while they’re actually doing the work with students.

[00:17:58] Santiago: And it’s a space for teachers to interact with each other, there’s forums for each lesson, what the course is, essentially what they are, they are a way to present the lesson plans and the step by step guides that we mentioned in an easy way to reach. And each lesson plan has a forum.

[00:18:25] David: I’ve gotta step in here. It is not about the lesson plans and the step-by-step guide, it is about the learning objectives. Each learning objective corresponds to a class. For each learning objective, Zach and the team have said we will create at least one example lesson plan if you have computers and at least one example lesson plan for if your students don’t have access to computers, so that you have something to start from. But it is not those that are important. It is the learning objectives and how they teach that.

Teachers are encouraged to use their own lesson plans, to develop their own things, to share those with other teachers, and to get that co-learning on the things they are developing. So it is not about the lesson plans, it’s about the learning objectives.

[00:19:10] Santiago: Thank you. That was a language problem for me, I was struggling to find the right words to describe this. And yes, completely agree, it is about the learning objectives. It’s split into learning objectives, and each learning objective has the lesson plans and step by step guides that you described.

But most importantly, in my opinion, it also has a forum. And they are certified courses by IINODEMS, the Kenya Mathematical Society and IDEMS. And to complete those courses, an individual educator, or a teacher would have to interact in the forums. That’s all they need to do. Tell their experience, respond to other people’s experiences, and I think that’s a really nice way to encourage the co-development, the co-creation of resources, the adaptation, improvement, and so on.

[00:20:06] David: Absolutely. The expectation is that, you know, the first few courses that are just getting put together, created now, and launched, they’re gonna have small numbers of students, but if the ministry and CEMASTEA get behind this, these are courses where we could have hundreds or maybe even more teachers engaging with each other, actually debating, figuring out how to teach this new curriculum well. That’s what we’re trying to get. We’re trying to build those communities.

What I think is so interesting is that, again, we are talking about this when this is really Mike’s brain child. This is what Mike has been conceiving of, I have to say, he would not have got to where he is now if we weren’t pushing him, which is why we are doing this episode and Mike is not because he’s busy doing other things and he’s struggling, he’s chasing his tail a little bit. But we are actually giving a big push from behind to make sure he succeeds.

But this is something where these details really matter and he’s getting a lot of the details right, and it’s just a struggle to get some of these things over the line in time. It’s a bit chaotic at the moment in Kenya, we’ve got one of our team members, Georg, is on the ground. We’ve got volunteers in helping him. There’s a lot, there’s a huge need. We don’t have real resources to put behind this, but we are supporting in any way we can.

[00:21:25] Santiago: We are indeed and we are not getting funding for this as you said, but that’s a different story, I don’t want to get drawn into that side of things.

I want to mention one final resource that IDEMS has developed, myself specifically, which I’m kind of proud of. I have to say artificial intelligence helped me a lot to get to this, and it’s not fully developed, but the final resource, which is a unifying thing, it’s a website for the project that presents the project as a whole and is a way to easily access all the different types of resources, different courses and different textbooks and so on and so forth.

[00:22:13] David: And as you said, your use of AI in this is extremely, this is very much one of the things which is of the moment, and this is great. And what’s interesting is that you’ve also integrated elements of IDEMS’ principles behind this. You’ve got common data cutting across from the textbooks into the website, and little bits of detail, which I think is setting this up for success in a way which I think could really be great.

[00:22:36] Santiago: Yes, and I think it’s worth getting a bit technical in here. The way I develop this website, or I’m developing this website, the information for the different resources is fed from two different JSON files that really, it is a way to structure data.

[00:22:56] David: Well, when you say they’re read from the JSON files, the JSON files correspond to spreadsheets. Again, we’re back to the same thing of spreadsheet authoring, which is exactly what we’ve discussed in other contexts in other places. It’s something where that data is being stored in one place, it’s then feeding into the website, but also then feeding back into the textbooks. And once we actually get our structures in place, it’ll hopefully also feed into the Moodle courses and we’ll start to get this automatic population of elements of this. Now that can take a little longer.

[00:23:25] Santiago: Yes, that it is a bit of a barrier because of course, in order to edit a course, you have to get certain permissions into Moodle, and there’s other sorts of complications.

[00:23:39] David: No, those complications are resolvable because we can have API calls coming out where it’s reading the data and anyway, these are things which are possible, they’re feasible.

[00:23:48] Santiago: But, as you said, it will take some time to get that final bit of integration. And I think that the integration, getting the data from a spreadsheet, feeding into JSONs, feeding into the website, JSONs could feed into the textbooks as well through scripts. It could eventually feed into the courses.

It means that we have a coherent mechanism, a coherent, I don’t want to call it a single technology because it’s not a single technology, something that fits into different technologies, but you go back to that spreadsheet authoring where you put all the data that you need, because essentially we’re working with different pieces of data, and you put the data in and it automatically could feed in to all these different areas. And it’s just so exciting.

[00:24:42] David: Well, I’m really glad you’re excited by this. I should be clear, we’re not the only people thinking about this particular thing. There’s lots of people who are doing this in different contexts in different ways. What I do think is nice, and it’s really, I’m really excited about how this is happening, is that it hasn’t been a big deal. Actually getting this website built within this ways, this is for the first time we’ve been able to do this in a way that… you’ve done it.

[00:25:08] Santiago: And with the help of AI, it’s still under construction, but the structures are there, and it was 10 hours of work.

[00:25:17] David: This is what’s changed. That’s the thing that we need to keep leaning into. We need to make this more accessible, to build these complex integrated systems by non-specialists. Because let’s be clear here, you are not a specialist in the programming sense, in our team, you are not the person who would’ve given the specialist task to, but you’ve done it in 10 hours. It’s amazing.

[00:25:38] Santiago: Let me be perfectly clear here, this is the first proper website I’ve developed. I’m not a web developer, I’m not a developer. I can read code fairly well, and with the help of AI, I can ask it to explain certain bits of code, but I am not a web developer or a developer in general at all.

[00:25:58] David: No, you are a math educator. And this is what’s so exciting, we are not there yet, but we are getting to the stage where the barriers to build complex technological systems, and there are pieces where you’ve got developers you’ve been able to lean on and just do these little bits, write certain scripts and so on, so there’s little pieces, but there’s small pieces. You as somebody who’s more on the sort of actual math education side, you are being able to build, not just a website, but a website with complexity. Oh, that’s exciting to me.

[00:26:31] Santiago: Yeah. And you mentioned the IDEMS’ principles, transdisciplinary, this the definition of transdisciplinary I think.

[00:26:39] David: Well, no it’s not, but we can dig into that another episode.

[00:26:43] Santiago: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now that you mentioned that, I have to call it a day, we are recording this on Saturday 14th and the first match of the Six Nations rugby tournament is starting right now. So I am going to call it a day, and we might do another episode on this at some point soon.

[00:27:04] David: Go, enjoy the match.

[00:27:06] Santiago: Thank you, David.