249 – Organising the 2026 STACK Conference

[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. It’s been a while. I’m looking forward to this discussion.

[00:00:21] Santiago: Yes. We haven’t had an episode for sometime now, and I think this is a particularly exciting one because we’ve been doing a lot of work on organising an event that’s coming up, which is really exciting.

[00:00:36] David: The STACK conference, I presume, is the one you are talking about.

[00:00:40] Santiago: That is, indeed. And it’s an official STACK conference, officially known as the international meeting of the STACK community, I believe. It’s been happening for eight years or so, and this is the first time it’s going to take place in an African country.

[00:01:02] David: More than that, it’s the first time it’s leaving Europe. This is a big deal, this is not just the first time it’s in Africa, it’s the first time it’s leaving Europe. And, what’s exciting of course, is that it is attracting people from Japan and further afield, who would sometimes make it to the European, but it has become a rather European event. Really, the event itself is spreading its wings as well as the fact that this is of course building with the African STACK community, which has now run three African STACK conferences.

[00:01:35] Santiago: Yes, and building on that, it is not just Europe, we have a whole team from the US, we have people from Latin America, we have of course quite a lot of people from Africa, people from Europe, people from Japan, and I believe there’s a couple of people potentially from New Zealand. 

[00:01:58] David: I think the Australian contingent were planning to attend, and unfortunately there were issues which meant that they couldn’t and that they’re not travelling so much ’cause of global politics, one could say. But it is really wonderful that there’s such a wide range of participants who are gonna be there.

[00:02:19] Santiago: Indeed. And, of course, we took an event that was very standard or had been very standardised and pretty much put it in the blender and came up with another format.

[00:02:38] David: It hadn’t been that standardised, but yes, you’re right.

[00:02:41] Santiago: Well, it was always a three day event, with a couple of morning workshops that were optional. It was, as far as I’m experienced with conferences, a standard style conference with a few workshops in the morning. 

[00:02:59] David: It’s still a conference. I mean, there’s the talks, there’s the sessions, we haven’t been totally radical as I have been in other events, but you are right.

[00:03:09] Santiago: Well, let me first point out one of the key differences that we’re implementing. For many people from the international community outside of Africa, you know, travelling to Kenya for an event like this, it might be a once in a lifetime opportunity. So we decided, it’s normally three days, why not five? And I think for the first time it is gonna be a five day event.

And interestingly it might be a bit more expensive to travel for some people there, but the conference cost itself, it’s still much lower in terms of organisation than other European conferences, which means that it’s still a viable event to run. More so, we managed to make it so that it’s quite inclusive and we can have, again I think for the first time, proper support funds for people who don’t have institutional support, which is a particular concern in African universities.

[00:04:27] David: Absolutely. And that’s been a really important part of how we’ve organised this. And we’ve also been very fortunate to get bits of funding from outside, not all of them have yet been approved, so we’ll see exactly what funding is available for this on top, but we are already guaranteed to have, I think, the most diverse event of this type. It’s really very exciting.

[00:04:50] Santiago: It is very exciting indeed, and it’s exciting to work with quite a varied organising team as well. There’s previous organisers, there’s people who were involved in organising other types of conferences, there’s the leadership from STACK, there’s country representatives from different African countries. It’s been so nice, a tough but nice process so far.

The conference itself will be from the 27th to the 31st of July, so things are starting to accelerate now, and decisions, important decisions, need to be made pretty much now. But even as early as the date of recording of this episode, we already have over 40 abstract submissions that are pretty good, which it’s quite a lot for this.

[00:05:41] David: For this event, I mean it is likely to become the largest such gathering, is what we’re expecting. Of course, we’re still expecting a few more people to sign up and a few more abstracts to come in. I know that there’s at least one more abstract to come in because I haven’t put my abstract in yet.

[00:05:57] Santiago: I know of at least eight more abstracts that are going to come in from the international community, and registrations. 

[00:06:05] David: It is a conference which is still in a small niche community because STACK, as we’ve discussed in previous episodes, is a very precise topic. But it is very, very exciting.

[00:06:20] Santiago: And going back to the changes, I think one of the most exciting changes is that it is still a conference, there are still sessions, there are still loads of presentations, posters, lightning talks, there’s all those standard things, but the workshops are taking quite a bit of prominence, and we’ve already defined at least 10 workshops that are gonna be run, probably in afternoons.

And that’s also part of the sort of inclusive view that we have for this conference, because not everyone has the same set of skills with STACK or the same needs with STACK. And we have some fantastic workshops on, for example, institutionalisation of STACK, basic STACK authoring to all the way through very complex STACK authoring issues. So we are trying to cater for everyone’s needs as much as we can.

[00:07:26] David: And taking advantage of the fact that we have the world experts in this, coming into a context which doesn’t often have access to such experts. It’s taking shape in a really nice way.

I think the thing which I’m really excited about is that there is an element, I believe, of the STACK community itself growing through this experience. This isn’t just supporting the African STACK community, but the STACK community as a whole. I think this is a signal of its growth in a way which is really pleasing, and very, how can I put it? Well, it’s of its time.

There does seem to be momentum gathering in a number of places, where recognition for what this community has built is starting to become more visible at the same time as the advances in AI are challenging what it has been before and challenging the community to respond and to find its place in education systems which have AI more deeply integrated, which is of course one of the themes of the conference, and a really important one.

[00:08:49] Santiago: And I think there are some structural changes that have gone into STACK itself as a bit of software, or a plugin to Moodle, and are helping this because it has improved in its technical capabilities. But one of the more exciting improvements, or two of the more exciting improvements are related to already existing questions.

So there’s a Git Sync tool that’s now a couple of years old, which allows you to share full sets of questions and keep track of changes with version control, and all sorts of things like that and deploy them in different places.

And there’s also the STACK Libraries. In the last couple of years, the STACK core team or the STACK project itself has developed a set of libraries of questions that now come standard with STACK on your installation and you can load them up and you can use them. It’s gone beyond the “this is a tool for assessment”, to “this is more of a community that can take advantage of these resources”.

[00:10:11] David: This has been, and full credit must of course go to Chris Sangwin on this, this has been a number of years in the making. Even just the International Advisory Board, which I’m part of, and the STACK professional network, which you are part of. These are initiatives which were conceived to take STACK beyond being a tool and really to help make it become a community, and to support that community.

And this is where, as IDEMS, we’ve been involved now in the development in ways that I think are exciting and interesting, in particular the integration with PreTeXt is one you haven’t mentioned, but is something that we’ve been very heavily involved in and has opened it up to a whole other community of people.

And it’s been very exciting to me to see people who are not STACK users introduced to STACK through PreTeXt, actually engaging with this and actually asking the questions, well, how could this add value and what’s needed to integrate?

[00:11:18] Santiago: Yeah. And I still remember, I believe, the first such community that joined the STACK community, or sort of merged with, was the JSXGraph community. And once JSXGraph was implemented or integrated as a standard tool for graphing within STACK, the JSX use and the JSX community grew as a result and vice versa. And I still remember attending a JSXGraph conference where about two thirds of the presentations were about how we’re using JSXGraph within STACK. And it was a JSXGraph event.

[00:11:57] David: And this is exactly where this sort of coming together of these open communities is something which is part of what is enabled by the STACK community growing and growing in strength itself. 

[00:12:11] Santiago: Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned two of the groups. There’s other groups as well working around STACK, there’s a research network, there’s more research happening, that’s a really important aspect for the success of STACK, getting publications. There’s a Zulip Chat, an informal means of communicating about STACK and about STACK problems, it’s like a similar version to Discord that is just for STACK. People with questions about authoring can post a question and they get help really quickly.

And of course you did mention the African STACK Leadership team, which is quite an exciting team and it has helped towards these events, that were part of the organisation, but they’re taking a big important role in the organisation of the conference itself.

[00:13:12] David: Mike Obiero, who leads that, who is the lead organiser, we have been his main support, of course, but it’s his initiative, it’s his decisions which have really driven this. And it’s great to see him flourishing in that role. The whole process of this and getting to the point where this event can be held in Kenya in a way where they have the confidence, having hosted the African STACK events, they have the confidence to really put themselves forward in this way, it’s wonderful.

[00:13:47] Santiago: Yes, and how can we not touch on one of IDEMS’ principles, capacity building. The whole process so far has included a big chunk of capacity building. Not because we didn’t have people with enough experience in Africa to run this, but just to make it as formal as possible, as professional as possible, we had people, quite a wide range of people helping, Meike Akveld, Tim Lowe, Chris Sangwin himself, putting a lot of time to help the team who are perhaps not as experienced in organising such an event. There’s one person in particular, who we mentioned in several podcasts before, he’s doing a PhD related to STACK in Italy, at the University Trieste, and he’s a key member of the organising team and he’s growing in skills in a way that is quite impressive.

[00:14:56] David: And it’s exactly where there are people, of course, who have this experience, but Juma didn’t and he’s gaining this experience. This is this capacity building element of being able to take people who have real potential, who are young and giving them these experiences, which also will be part of his CV and as he grows into other things, he can take this with him.

It’s such an important part of what an event like this can leave as a legacy. These events can play many different roles, but I’ve always been surprised at what the legacy of such an event can be and how important it can be.

I have concrete examples of this, where in other communities, events which happened 10, 15 years ago, are still defining the community that is being built around it. And I do believe this could be a defining event for the STACK community, that having an African hosted event of the international STACK community will open the community itself up to, I think, collaborations that haven’t been possible in the same way before.

And one of the reasons for that is that the African STACK community has reached a place where it can now present opportunities to the international community because it’s got real substance to it. And so those collaborations can be really mutually beneficial in a way that I’m really excited to see, and just hopeful that these collaborations emerge.

[00:16:52] Santiago: Yeah, and just to put it in practice, some of the courses that are being done in African countries have thousands of students, so having access to student data on STACK usage could become much more widely accessible. That’s one small component of what you’re saying.

[00:17:17] David: Let me reframe what you’re saying because I agree, but I want to make sure it’s clear. It’s that research studies based on large numbers of students for how those students interact with STACK questions are actually not that prominent in the literature. And collaborating with African educators who have these large class sizes on those research questions is an opportunity for educators internationally who are interested in such research, and could really be able to therefore have really good mutual collaboration where you can be getting deep learning about student interactions with digital assessment at a scale that is difficult to achieve in other contexts, but happens quite naturally in many of these African universities where the student numbers are so large. So it’s a really interesting opportunity for collaboration.

[00:18:20] Santiago: It is indeed. It’s quite an exciting project in general, and it has been a lot of work, it will be a lot of work, and I am looking forward to having another episode after the event to tell the audience how it’s gone. 

[00:18:38] David: Absolutely.

The last thing that I would like to say right now is that as we are preparing this event, one of the things which is always at the forefront of my mind is that some things you try to build and then things grow from. We are not going to have another event like this for many years. So this is an example of a one-off spark. How is it that we can make this sort of one-off event actually be a spark, not for the same things, but for new things to emerge?

This is what I think is so exciting, it’s a big deal in itself, and it is the potential spark for new things. It’s a culmination of five years, at least, actually since 2019 is when we first started working with partners with these workshops, so it’s seven years, which is sort of culminating in this event. The event is in itself a new beginning, and so it’s really interesting to see what that becomes.

[00:19:50] Santiago: It is indeed, and I think that’s a really lovely place to stop.

[00:19:53] David: Thank you.

[00:19:54] Santiago: Thank you, David.