245 – Open GCSE Textbooks with PreTeXt

[00:00:06] 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.

Really looking forward to this discussion because recently someone approached me with a question.

[00:00:25] Santiago: Okay, interesting. 

[00:00:28] David: So, they were looking to support colleagues who have a school, and the school is run on the IGCSE, the Cambridge IGCSE, and they know we do work in open textbooks, and they said, what textbooks can you recommend? And I said, there’s quite a lot of good open textbooks out there, I’ll look at what there is, which is directly relevant to this.

And of course what I found was interesting, that there are some good open textbooks out there, but there’s nothing which is tailored to specifically IGCSE, let’s say. And it really got me thinking, because this relates to the other work that we are doing.

[00:01:06] Santiago: Correct me if I’m wrong, but there’s a lot more textbooks for first year or early years undergraduates than for secondary school level.

[00:01:17] David: No, there’s quite a few for secondary school level, there’s a lot of good resources, you’re right, for undergraduates, there’s loads of open textbooks, these are the ones that we work with. We do a lot more at the university level. But there are some good open resources for A-level, GCSE, but none of them are tailored to specific curriculums, they’re just generic. And this is what suddenly surprised me, that there’s a real need for people to have, just as we are doing in the Kenyan context, the open textbooks put together for specific curriculums. And because there’s good open textbooks out there, the material is covered, but it’s not organised.

[00:02:01] Santiago: And of course, there’s quite a few examination boards in the UK and internationally for GCSE or IGCSE. And the recent episode that you did with Lily about different variants of books is exactly what could be of value here. Because the content for each examination board is quite similar, the difference from my experience teaching different examination boards is that there’s a lot of overlap, but the way questions are posed may be different, the examples that they provide may be different, there might be a couple of topics that are included in one and not including others.

For example, introduction to differentiation is in some examination boards, while it’s not in most. There are some subtle differences, but overall, the content is pretty similar.

[00:02:57] David: Absolutely. And what’s really, of course, clear is that the content  already exists in open form in some form of textbook, under sensible, open licenses. But putting it together for different examination boards, that’s something which hasn’t really been done. And I think that is something which requires this variant logic that we’ve been talking about. As you said, Lily and I had an episode on this recently, it’s something we are working towards putting those structures in place.

I had to get back to my colleague and say, “I’m sorry, there isn’t anything directly relevant to this that I can find”. And really, that seems so silly that there’s such an interesting need there, and an opportunity of course as well. Again, the interactive component is a genuine opportunity, giving good interactive assessments for mastery.

[00:03:47] Santiago: Two points that come to mind. The original one was before you mentioned interactive, that there are a few open and cheap, let’s say, resources that are tailored to specific exam boards, but none of them are in the form of textbooks. They tend to be more on revision guides, on past paper questions, and alike.

And the second one on interactive: some individual exam boards have recognised textbooks or textbooks that their own publishing company produces that do have interactive components. And from my experience, the interactive components are not quite as deep, let’s say, as some of the contents that we could create on STACK on JSX graph, which is a dynamic geometry package that can be used in STACK, even on GeoGebra or other packages in general.

[00:04:54] David: And of course, that is extra work because that doesn’t exist in that sense. But that’s also something which, once it exists, it’s reusable, again, across context. And so it is an opportunity that I see for maybe us with others to collaborate, to find the right collaborators interested in doing this.

[00:05:15] Santiago: And you mentioned reusable in different contexts. What Lily is doing with the statistics textbooks is wonderful. But my instinct tells me that there is more potential for reusability because of the more universal curriculum in secondary mathematics.

[00:05:35] David: Yeah, well, I think easier reusability is certainly the case, more scalable reusability, I think is certainly the case. The statistics and data science textbooks that Lily is working on are actually really important, and really reusable, and central to university level. But university level education is always a smaller need than secondary education, which is universal.

That’s something where adapting the secondary to different contexts, across different languages as well, this is really exciting.

[00:06:07] Santiago: And what is most exciting, I think, is that this reusability means that there could be textbook related business models for high resource environments with that idea that we have of “opting out” for perhaps lower resources audiences within the high resource environments. But again, the reusability in low resource environments with potentially a very small minority paying for those resources, there could really be a sustainable business model behind it that can help push this forward in quite exciting ways.

[00:06:48] David: Absolutely. And it’s something where the wonderful work that’s happening in Kenya on the Kenyan textbooks, is just so inspirational. But it would be really helped if we were also doing that work for international textbooks and they could be drawing on, and building from, and interacting with this for IGCSE textbooks as well, let’s say.

And that would then just mean that there’s this wider crossover of resources. It would be amazing to actually have those different environments able to learn and integrate with each other. That’s the vision, of course.

[00:07:24] Santiago: Of course. And anything that is reusable for loads of different contexts is always beneficial. However, I’m a bit skeptical in the sense that, even if there are open textbooks, creating and curating that material to make sure that it’s relevant to an examination board initially, and maybe perhaps extend to other examination boards afterwards, it would take a lot of resources, and I don’t know how we could achieve it. Perhaps this is not very constructive and it’s more about IDEMS business, but I’m worried that this could be a great idea, but fall flat due to lack of funding, to simplify it. 

[00:08:17] David: So, let’s be clear here. At this point in time, this is not something which we could strategically invest in. It is too big for that, it is something that we wouldn’t be able to pull off right now. But it is something that we can work towards. And I think this is something which I think is different, and I think it’s something where we are having this realisation of this concrete need. This is a concrete need and a concrete opportunity.

Actually let’s make the business model, let’s actually go through and see what it would take. Can we actually articulate it in a way that we could work out the business model which would make it financially viable? I’m not saying this is gonna happen, I’m not saying it’s gonna happen soon, but I am saying that I don’t believe I was aware that there was this concrete opportunity, and it was only after being asked for it that I became aware that there is a concrete opportunity for textbooks even in high resource environments.

[00:09:24] Santiago: But you were aware of the potential of STACK because I worked in two schools in which people were willing to pay for STACK. And I worked with a chap that has a tutoring company that was very interested in incorporating STACK into his company’s tutoring capabilities.

[00:09:48] David: Absolutely. So this is stuff we’ve been discussing for ages, this is something we’re aware of. But the simple idea of a digital and open textbook and the fact that open textbooks could be tailored to specific exam boards, this is something where I think it is less work than the idea of actually getting the STACK questions first, starting with the textbook, rather than starting with the assessment, which is what we’ve always discussed. We’ve always discussed STACK for the revision, let’s say, the STACK assessment for revision, which is something which I still believe would be really effective and impactful.

[00:10:28] Santiago: And we tried to get funding for.

[00:10:30] David: We have tried and failed to get funding for, yes. But the fact that actually there is a low hanging fruit where we don’t need to do all the work you’re suggesting and just to be able to tailor a textbook for an exam board, that’s a much lower bar to jump over to get started and to have something concrete.

[00:10:52] Santiago: And presumably people would use it due to its openness and potentially not necessarily get to the exam board recognised books. 

[00:11:03] David: Well, this is the first thing to see. I mean, we know now, I didn’t know this a few weeks ago, but there is a demand, there are contexts within which such a textbook would be of value and would be used and useful. And that’s something which I didn’t know before. And I think that feels like something which is very achievable. Getting it with the embedded STACK is an added value, it’s not necessary. That’s the new thought.

[00:11:36] Santiago: Yeah, but hang on a second. You’re talking about one data point and any conclusion made from one data point cannot be really relied upon.

[00:11:46] David: This is an interesting question. No, in general, you are right. Of course, one data point is not enough. But after having that one data point, that one question posed to me, I started looking into it. And it was what I found that made me interested, that there is a huge gap. And that what is already there is there in a way that it could be put together quite easily under the same open licenses, but reorganised.

So, what we’re really talking about is a way to do that. There’s no platform through which at the moment you could deliver these different variants for the different exam boards and so on. That’s the thing which I think is something which fits into exactly what we’re building for the statistics case. And so, it’s a reuse of the technologies we’re building in this context, which I think is possible now in a way that I hadn’t imagined before. And so it’s not just the data point, it’s what that question being posed to me led me to discover as I tried to help.

[00:12:48] Santiago: And of course, Lily’s work and the work in Kenya with the textbooks is laying down the foundations in order to be able to do this in a somewhat streamlined manner . We have some structure in place in order to be able to do that from what is already available. I have to say, I haven’t looked into what might be available, so I’d like to do that piece of research at some point soon. 

[00:13:15] David: And then we can have a follow on. Will you be excited as I am? That’s a big ask.

[00:13:21] Santiago: That is a big ask, you do get excited, but this all sounds very exciting and promising. And of course once we get to GCSE, why not A-Level, why not IB, why not so many other different types of exam boards? The SAT in the US, loads and loads of different potentials there.

[00:13:41] David: But the point is that they’re not separate, because they’re covering overlapping content. And this is what’s actually already out there. What’s already out there is sort of good materials, good resources, which cover the broad content for the right age groups.

And that’s what I think could then be used, brought into bear on specific curricula as a relatively low hanging fruit, leaning on and building from the shoulders of the existing open educational resource community, but bringing it to people in a format which is closer to what they actually need, what they really need.

And so I think there’s something we could start. I’m not sure exactly what or when or how. I’m not sure whether we start by putting it together as a business plan or whether we start by getting some things together and making some things happen.

But I think this is something where we couldn’t have done this even a year ago, because if it wasn’t for the Kenyan textbook work, we wouldn’t have recognised that PreTeXt is the tool of choice for us to actually enable this to happen in a semantic way, which is at the heart of what we want to do. So, yeah, it might be just its time, we shall see. Let’s see what happens over the next few months.

[00:14:58] Santiago: Yeah. And you talked about a potential business model, and within that, it’s always a question that what is quite difficult with open educational resources from secondary schools is the route to market. We had one very interesting question from someone, I believe you mentioned this in passing before, who has done some work with secondary schools in different contexts. And I have some networks and SAMI, the charity that we work in partnership with, has also some networks. But, we don’t necessarily believe in advertising our work, getting it out there organically might be a bit of a challenge.

[00:15:48] David: Absolutely. But even that, to me the starting point is simply the fact that there are contexts within which this could be seized. This is a lot of the context that we know, which are international contexts, which are different to the UK schools, for example, context, that we also know and we know there’s actually a lot of resistance to change because there’s a lot of people who try to market their products in that context.

So, there’s some really interesting questions around this, I don’t have answers to that at this point, but having looked into this, I am now convinced that there is a contribution to be made, bringing together efforts that could be transformative about the people at the margins, for the people at the margins of this. This is where I was brought in, it was a school in Somalia, I believe, that was reaching out to a colleague, they were doing the international GCSEs, and so on. There’s these fringe cases, I think we could start at the margins and build from there, and just see what happens.

[00:16:57] Santiago: And of course, one of the things that we’re doing in Kenya is trying to build a community around it. If we are successful at building that community, I think that the route to market or the scaling could be quite visible. It’s very exciting, very exciting ideas, very exciting work.

[00:17:15] David: And I’ve got an upcoming trip to Rwanda, and I’m visiting a really interesting school when I’m there, the African Olympiad school. So we should do another episode on that when I come back, maybe even while I’m there. Anyway, this has been good .

[00:17:28] Santiago: Thank you, David.