Episode 36: Inside LabXchange’s Kenyan Teacher Ambassador Cohort

Nati Rodriguez [2:40]  

Before we dive into the details of LabXchange’s Kenya Teacher Ambassador Program, could you start by telling us a bit about yourself and your role at LabXchange, Ilyana?  

Ilyana Sawka [2:51]  

Yes. So, my current role at LabXchange is Outreach and Communications Manager. And so what I spend my days thinking about is, how do we tell the LabXchange story and connect with as many different groups and people around the world who are looking for free and high-quality solutions for teaching and learning science? I oversee social media, marketing, and other communications channels for LabXchange.  

Nati Rodriguez [3:25] 

Got it. And you’ve been with the organization for six years. What initially drew you to work with this organization?  

Ilyana Sawka [3:32] 

I started with LabXchange as executive assistant to our late faculty director. I was working as executive assistant to Dr. Robert Lue, who was a biology professor at Harvard University. In addition to his work teaching biology to undergraduates, he had tremendous ideas and visions for how the university could also be a place for outreach and intergenerational learning, and opportunities to bring together people from across disciplines, schools, the community, the classroom, all around the pursuit of learning and bringing that to as many people as possible. So I supported Robert Lue for a few years, and then he started working on a new proposal for a project called LabXchange, and I was able to work with him and our Managing Director and a few other individuals on putting that grant proposal together, and it became the focus of his work and his life before he very tragically passed away from cancer in 2020. So, under Robert Lue’s vision and leadership, we developed the LabXchange platform and launched it to the world and so my role emerged from there. 

Nati Rodriguez [5:14] 

Got it. And do you feel that you’re realizing this vision? Has it evolved now into something different? What does it look like compared to what that first draft of the proposal was written about? 

Ilyana Sawka [5:28] 

The initial scope of LabXchange is not that different from what we aim to create and put out into the world now. We’re really passionate about creating equitable access to the best digital learning resources. That has always been the central focal point of LabXchange, especially when we started writing the proposal in 2017, 2018, we were looking at the successes of online learning and the Massive Open Online Courses evolution (MOOC), and what we weren’t seeing were ways to meaningfully put all of that digital learning material that was being created by university educators, and put that into the hands of high school educators and high school students in a way that was easily customizable, and could be personalized and contextualized for maybe a high school biology classroom, or a high school civics classroom, or even a middle school environmental science classroom. And so, we continue to use that mission of bringing high-quality learning resources to everyone, everywhere for free. 

Nati Rodriguez [6:52] 

That’s great. Thank you. And now let’s discuss the Kenya Teacher Ambassador Program. Can you explain what the program is and its mission? 

Ilyana Sawka [7:02] 

 In 2023 we relaunched a National Teacher Ambassador Program that brought together educators from across the U.S. Shortly after that, we were connected with Dr. Tom Okaya, who helped us set up our first International Teacher Ambassador cohort, which was the Kenya cohort. And so, the success of that cohort and the example that it set for our Teacher Ambassador Program continues to be what we are building on and expanding as we continue to grow our Teacher Ambassador Program. 

Nati Rodriguez [7:41] 

And why Kenya specifically? And is there a country that you’re looking towards next? 

Ilyana Sawka [7:51] 

So, I’ll have to give a little bit of context. LabXchange is an international global team; we have a team that’s based here at Harvard University in the northeast of the U.S. At the same time, we also have a vibrant team of designers, project managers, and developers who are based in Cape Town, South Africa. Given that we have a team on the ground and given that Africa has such a vibrant and growing youth population, one that is in many ways and in many places under-resourced and underserved, it was important to us to develop strategies for bringing the resources that we have built and the platform that we have built to populations in Africa and to learn about ways in which LabXchange can be used in local context. So, learning about realities on the ground that for us, here in the U.S., are things that we don’t necessarily have to think about or deal with. We typically don’t have to worry about issues with data bandwidth, Internet, or access to at least one device in the classroom. So, we wanted to make sure that our Teacher Ambassador Program, when it went global, would expand to Africa. So, we started with Kenya, and we are looking to connect with educators and policymakers across the continent. And so, since the Kenya cohort started, we have also launched programs in Gambia, Nigeria, as well as two Pan-African cohorts that bring together educators from across multiple regions of Africa. In total, our Global Ambassador Program has brought together educators from over 30 countries worldwide. 

Nati Rodriguez [10:00] 

Got it. And how many ambassadors have gone through the program, and what’s the length of the experience for them? 

Ilyana Sawka [10:10] 

The Teacher Ambassador Program is a rigorous three-month program. It starts by selecting one or two master teachers. Dr. Okaya is an example of a master teacher who helped us bring together a group of 18 to 20 educators who then underwent training with the LabXchange team. The training entails, what is LabXchange? How is this online platform used? How can you use it in your classroom? What can it do? They learn about online teaching, digital pedagogy, how to create a pathway that they can deploy in their classroom, as well as the learning management tools that LabXchange offers. 

Nati Rodriguez [11:03] 

 What are some of the criteria you look for in selecting teachers to participate in the program beyond the master teachers?  

Ilyana Sawka [11:14] 

We’re looking primarily for secondary teachers, since our main focus is on high school, though we also support intermediate and even community college level or undergraduate level in some contexts, STEM teaching and learning. Other than that, we are looking for a variety of disciplines — we’ve had teachers from the program who are biology teachers, chemistry, physics, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and even some who are responsible for training science educators in their country. So, we’ve had some people at universities training a new generation of science teachers. Other than that, we rely on some level of digital literacy. But other than that, the most important thing is eagerness and openness to this new tool and this new technology, and willingness to learn and share both insights with our team, and also sharing LabXchange as an alumnus of the program. As alumni of the program, we are looking for educators who are then willing and excited to bring LabXchange to their local communities. 

Nati Rodriguez [13:07] 

What feedback have you received from teachers that have gone through the program? Any interesting insights from their perspective? 

Ilyana Sawka [13:16] 

We’ve learned a lot about some of the realities that teachers around the world are contending with. So, we’ve learned about ways in which teachers in Africa can help their students experience the joy of scientific discovery in settings in which they don’t have access to lab equipment or a ton of technology or devices. On the one hand, we’ve learned things like, how we can provide resources in ways that are more easily adaptable to different physical realities. We’ve also heard great feedback about ways in which LabXchange is working. In schools and communities where teachers don’t have access to lab environments, LabXchange offers virtual lab simulations. And so, we’ve gotten wonderful feedback about how our simulations can give students a feeling for what it’s like to work in a lab, do research in a lab, and experience that process of experimentation and discovery without access to physical lab resources. We also get a lot of great feedback about LabXchange pathways. So, the pathway feature allows any user to curate a playlist of learning resources, like a lesson plan, that can bring together different modalities of content, content from different sources on different topics, or different perspectives. And so, we’ve heard a lot of teachers tell us how much they appreciate that ability to tailor a learning experience for any given student or group of students that they can then easily customize and use in next semester’s class or next year’s class, depending on how their teaching has changed or how their students’ needs have changed. 

Nati Rodriguez [15:27] 

That’s great. Well, I know that LabXchange recently achieved a significant milestone of 50 million users globally since its launch in 2020, which is an incredible accomplishment. Thank you again for sharing where it came from and how it’s evolved. Could you share about this milestone and what’s next for LabXchange? 

Ilyana Sawka [15:53] 

Great question. We are so excited to have recently crossed the 50 million user threshold. When we launched in 2020, we set a five-year goal to reach 50 million users worldwide. And so, the fact that we’ve achieved a milestone a little ahead of schedule is so exciting for us. And knowing that we have reached and resonated with learners, educators, and other kinds of users in over 230 countries and territories is exciting and gives us the motivation to continue our work.  

Some of the things that we are looking to do in the next few years is to continue expanding the Teacher Ambassador Program. As I mentioned, we have engaged over 250 educators since 2023 in the Teacher Ambassador Program. We want to continue expanding the program, running cohorts, and bringing it to new locations and new countries as part of our work to support learners and educators in all countries of the world, as many places as possible; and to empower teachers, whatever language they speak, wherever they are, whatever they have access to.  

Another project that we’re working on is translation. In collaboration with some of our teacher ambassador alumni and current programs, as well as other interested volunteers and other resources, we are working to continue translating the LabXchange interface and select content into as many new languages as possible; we have a goal of 30 languages within the next couple of years. We are at 19, so we hope that opens the door to new users who, maybe, had limited access to LabXchange previously due to language barriers. So, we’re very excited to add new languages.  

We’re also working to ensure that our resources, our library, are easy to navigate, and can help any teacher find what they need when they need it. We have put together an extensive library of resources — we have over 28,000 resources available across the variety of languages that we support. But it’s important to us to make sure those resources are indexed in a way that allows teachers to easily and seamlessly deploy them in their classes. So we are also working with our Teacher Ambassador Programs to develop curricular alignment for the resources in our library so that a teacher in Nigeria can sign on to LabXchange and quickly and easily find the resources that map to their curriculum, or a teacher in the U.S. can find resources that support the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). We know that teachers have limited time available so it’s important to us to continue to work to optimize our library and our tools, to continue saving educators time so they can do what they do best, which is working with their students and inspiring them to continue and to excel. 

Nati Rodriguez [19:41] 

That’s great, and thanks for reminding us of our audience. Hopefully, we’ll get some new teachers who will start using LabXchange and take a peek at the resources that are available and find them useful for their classrooms. Do you happen to know what the most popular resource is on LabXchange that you could share with us?  

Ilyana Sawka [20:05] 

I think I do. So, I mentioned our virtual lab simulations. We have a suite of virtual lab simulations that are created by the LabXchange team. We continue to develop new lab simulations; we currently have 21 virtual lab simulations created by the LabXchange team. When you include all of the simulations in our library, which come from our content collaborators — wonderful organizations like PhET Interactive Simulations and the Concord Consortium, and others – we have 700 simulations in our library. But the LabXchange virtual simulations are designed to be a full representation of a lab environment, and so they’re structured in a way where a learner comes in and is brought into the process of doing research from start to finish. So, by starting with the background and the idea of creating a hypothesis, asking a research question that you can test, to familiarity with all the different components that you see when you enter a lab to do a specific protocol — everything from a pipette, to a container solution, to a trash bin because there’s a certain way of disposing of trash in a lab environment that you want to be cognizant of. And of course, after going through the simulation and having an opportunity to model what it looks like to use these tools and run these protocols, you’re then prompted to reflect on what you learned, to compare your results with what you predicted would happen, and think about what that means and what you might do differently the next time you do that protocol. Because something that is important for us to emphasize is that science is an iterative journey. Even if you’re a professional scientist, whatever that may look like, a big part of your job is learning from things that fail; it’s learning from things that didn’t go the way you expected them to, and that is part of doing science. And so, our virtual lab simulations continue to be the most popular content that we offer in our library; it’s something that we’re proud of and excited about. And of course, we want to continue to create lab simulations, get feedback from users, both learners and educators, and tell us how we can continue to improve our lab simulations. How can we make them easier to use in different learning contexts and different learning environments? 

Nati Rodriguez [23:10] 

Thank you, Ilyana. Is there anything else that you would like to share with the Learner audience before we sign off? 

Ilyana Sawka [23:14] 

Well, we’re always looking for educators who are interested in getting involved in using LabXchange. Our team is always thrilled to hear from educators, administrators, and policymakers. We’re always happy to do a demo or point you toward support resources that can help you learn how to use LabXchange in different ways. If you’re interested in being part of a Teacher Ambassador Program or seeing a Teacher Ambassador Program in your community, we would love to hear from you.  So, if there are any educators out there who are interested in getting involved, you can visit educators.labXchange.org, and there you can learn about our Teacher Ambassador Program and our cohorts to date; there’s an interest form and some other information about ways to get involved. You can also drop an email to [email protected] with whatever your query or idea might be. And would be happy to get in touch and hear your story and learn more about your teaching experience and how LabXchange might be able to be a part of that story. 

Nati Rodrigeuz [24:32] 

Great, amazing. Thank you so much, Ilyana. This has been wonderful. Annenberg Learner is a partner of LabXchange. You can find some of our series on the site, and it’s been a wonderful partnership with an incredible team that has been responsive to the needs of educators, just a beautiful design and platform that’s easy to use. So, thank you. 

Ilyana Sawka [24:41] 

Thank you so much, Nati.  

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Nati Rodriguez [25:44] 

 All right, welcome Tom. 

Tom Okaya [25:46] 

Thank you very much, Nati.  

Nati Rodriguez [25:49] 

I’d like to start by asking you to share a little bit about yourself. How did you get into STEM teaching? 

Tom Okaya [25:55] 

I chose to become a teacher after completing high school — I decided to teach as a profession under the influence of my dad. I chose to join the profession to impact the lives of young people, and I felt that I had the right skills to offer teaching. So, I was trained as a math and physics teacher. Later, I taught in high school and rose through the ranks to my current position. 

Nati Rodriguez [26:29] 

Got it. Thank you. And what grade levels or age levels did you start your career with? 

Tom Okaya [26:35] 

I started my career teaching 9th grade. So, I began teaching physics and mathematics to learners between the ages of 14 to 18 in a local rural school in the lower coast part of Kenya.  

Nati Rodriguez [27:01] 

What resources or support do you currently have for teaching these subjects, and what additional resources would be most beneficial?  

Tom Okaya [27:12] 

The main resource that we rely on is textbooks. If you are teaching a subject, most of the time you will have to rely on the course books, which are provided by the government, of which some schools don’t have enough. However, that has been changing slowly and gradually with increased access to the internet. We see that teachers are increasingly pursuing online resources and trying to diversify their approach in selecting them. That is an opportunity that I decided to explore more — to try and help teachers be able to access both the physical resources they have that’s the textbooks – and the online resources.  

Nati Rodriguez [28:06] 

Got it. And did you say that everybody uses the same textbooks?  

Tom Okaya [28:12] 

Yes, our curriculum is seeking uniformity and access. Those are the core issues — that every learner, in every part of the country, should learn the same thing. So that is a mechanism to ensure that each learner gets the same content, get at the right time so that the textbook becomes their main source of information. 

Nati Rodriguez [29:11] 

Got it. With online resources like LabXchange, are those universally available to everybody, or is there an access issue there? 

Tom Okaya [29:24] 

If I could talk about LabXchange — in my opinion, I can rate it at about 20%. 20% of the teachers, and most of the teachers are those who are in urban settings, where internet and electricity are available. Kenya can be categorized into four: We have the rural settings, and we also have hard-to-reach areas. In other words, they are areas where they face extreme difficulty in accessing education. They may not have schools; they have to walk long distances to school; they don’t have physical infrastructure. About 20% of them are not able to access LabXchange because of a lack of key infrastructures. So, when you talk about LabXchange, you will find that we are concentrated around schools in the urban setting, and the main reason is because of one driver, the key infrastructure, which is electricity and internet connectivity. 

Nati Rodriguez [30:25] 

Thank you for that context. So, you are part of the LabXchange Teacher Ambassador Program. Can you describe your role in the program and what is the primary goal?  

Tom Okaya [30:37] 

I work as a Director at the Teacher Service Commission, and one thing I do in the church Teacher Service Commission is promote the use of edtech in our public institution. I also work as the lead for the Kenya national STEM learning ecosystem and through that network, I was introduced to the Harvard University Program of the LabXchange. And the discussion then was — we were seeking alternative use for schools that don’t have a physical laboratory. We have so many primary schools that don’t have physical laboratories, and therefore they are not able to participate actively in science education. We see a lot drop out because students lack basic science skills. So, we see a very undermined STEM pathway at the university level. So, to address that, we talked to LabXchange which is the Harvard University program and were able to introduce it to Kenya. So, what I did was identify 10-20 teachers, that I considered very innovative and impactful in their teaching, across the country. The 20 teachers were trained by Harvard University’s LabXchange program for about six weeks of virtual training. So, my role was to ensure that we get the right teachers. So, one of the things that I did was to make sure that every teacher in the program has made a clique in their own space and had made an impact on the learners. Then, after training them, they joined me to roll out the same in the national training, which targeted about 50,000 teachers. So, I played the role of ensuring that there is quality in the selection, there’s access during the training, they have a space they could use to train, and to ensure that they get funding in a small way from the government.  

Nati Rodriguez [32:41] 

That’s a good point that you raised about one of the features of LabXchange are those virtual labs that allow simulations for folks that may not be able to get into a lab to physically do the work. I am curious, what have been some of the outcomes or impacts of this program now, on the educational landscape in Kenya, given that there are so many teachers that you’ve helped select.  

Tom Okaya [33:11] 

There is a lot of evidence that learner participation in science has increased, and I think I can pick it out from the data provided about the activity from LabXchange. The accounts created by teachers are evidence that more learners are accessing the lab and participating. We also see teachers develop lesson pathways; in other words, teachers are demonstrating that they can go into the resources and select activities they think are useful for learning. So, one of the things that we hope for, in the next three or four years, is to see whether there is a nexus between that activity and the learning outcome, and to see whether that learning outcome is resulting in an increased career STEM pathway in the university and other tertiary institutions. 

Nati Rodriguez [34:08] 

That’s great to hear. And especially when the pipeline starts early to get these folks into those industries, so I could see the benefit of the exposure and the access. This past May the U.S. announced a new partnership with the government of Kenya to support universities and industry to drive innovation, research, and job growth in STEM-related fields in the country. How do you see this partnership improve access to STEM education for your students, and are they being tracked? 

Tom Okaya [34:42] 

One thing we try to influence is policy. Because the low participation in STEM has to do with government policy. When students join 9th grade, that is when they come from primary, they join high school— they are given options. They are told you can do physics, or you can drop physics – that’s a government policy. Government policy, to some extent, has been driven by the availability of resources. Some schools will say, we can’t offer the three sciences because we don’t have laboratories. Therefore, even if a student is interested in pursuing STEM, he or she finds themselves in a situation where there are no resources to support their ambition, to support their passion.  

So as an ecosystem, we try our best to give the government alternative ways in which learners can still learn STEM when there is no teacher, or there are limited resources. That has also done two things to us: One, it has triggered the passion of the private sector to support STEM education. Currently, I see there are so many initiatives in the private sector. They are also trying to bring up the fact that they are training because there was an attempt to show that it’s doable. The other thing is it builds the learners’ confidence – they can try things on their own. LabXchange is not working in a controlled environment. School labs are locked; after five students can’t access them unless they make prior arrangements and schools are very keen to ensure that their resources are not depleted. So, they won’t allow students to use the resources, or students will be in a school with the laboratory but not have access to the laboratory. So, this is also a way that opens students to say, I can do simulations. I can try it out and see the results, I can do it differently at no cost. And therefore, they work in a safe environment. To us, that is a great achievement as an ecosystem and as people in the government, because the government can buy in what comes from the private sector, and the private sector can influence how the government policies are being formulated,  

Nati Rodriguez [37:20] 

And I assume there’s a demand for folks who are in STEM fields once they enter the workforce? 

Tom Okaya [37:27]  

A great demand. Kenya is a growing economy, and the vision for Kenya is to become a new industrialized country with middle income and improve the wellness of the people by the year 2030. If you look at that vision it has three pillars: One of the pillars is STEM. We don’t have enough industries in our country — the industries that used to be there, like Coca-Cola, is one big industry that was in Kenya but relocated – because of the cost of the workforce. They have very few people who can work in those firms, and they have to bring them from outside. So, they decided to locate to South Africa — our biggest competitor is South Africa, where you can find that they can work with the universities and other institutions to develop or produce a very robust workforce in STEM. 

Nati Rodriguez [38:27] 

As far as the educators, what does that pipeline look like? Are there enough teachers to now deploy these resources like LabXchange, or even get the word out?  

 Tom Okaya [38:44] 

We have a shortage of teachers countrywide. It’s pegged around 50,000 teachers, and out of those 50,000 teachers, about a quarter of them are in STEM education. So, we have a big shortage of teaching with a greater impact in the STEM field. So, LabXchange is now giving teachers an opportunity to reach out to other schools. It’s the effective utilization of the fewer resources that are there in the teaching of science and mathematics because I see schools collaborating. The 20 ambassadors come from different schools; they come together and develop lesson pathways available in the platform for other teachers to access. So, even if a teacher is not a teacher of chemistry, with properly developed materials they can step in and take their learners through the content without having to wait for a physics teacher to be there. We don’t want to say we are using unqualified teachers, but we are using alternative ways to be able to provide education to our learners. 

Nati Rodriguez [39:58] 

That’s fantastic. It seems like a good model to get to meet those goals by 2030. What would you like to see in STEM education in Kenya? So, five years from now, 10 years from now, what does that look like to you? 

Tom Okaya [40:20] 

My desire in the next five years is to see innovations by our learners. At the moment, we consume a lot of innovation from outside. We get things from outside, which makes our life a bit difficult. But I believe that as we build the confidence of learners and as we nurture them in scientific skills, then we start seeing innovations locally. We start seeing patenting intellectual properties. We start getting to see small industries emerging by people providing solutions to the problem, because we have very many problems – from climate issues, from problems that we have created ourselves for lack of knowledge in science and technology, mathematics. So, we want to see a generation that will be able to fix our roads. We are faced with so many things in this country, what we lack is the right technology. 

• • LabXchange
  • LabXchange Kenyan Teacher Ambassador Cohort
  • STEM
  • Harvard University