REFLECTIONS ON USING TECHNOLOGY TO TEACH STATISTICS IN KENYA David Stern African Institute of Mathematical Science - Next Einstein Initiative Maseno University, Kenya dstern@nexteinstein.org Over the last ten years or more there have been numerous successful integrations of technology in statistics teaching in Kenya. Between them they show overwhelming evidence that technology can significantly improve student learning, but none have really impacted the “status quo”. This paper examines some past initiatives to identify commonalities that have contributed to their successes while also investigating why they have not been widely adopted. Many of the challenges will sound familiar to educators all over the world, for example the lack of academic recognition for good teaching, heavy workloads and institutional resistance to change. Questions are posed relating to how resources, support structures, and incentives or reward schemes might create an educational environment within which good initiatives can “go viral”. INTRODUCTION In 2002, three ICOTS ago, Odhiambo, a leading figure in Kenyan Statistics presented a paper on the state of statistics teaching in Kenya emphasizing the need to include technology and practical skills in statistics teaching across all academic levels (Odhiambo, 2002). Six years later he followed up with a white paper (Odhiambo & Onyango, 2008). Their conclusions included the uptake of technology being slow, there being a lack of statistical educational resources and a need for research into statistics education. Twelve years have now passed, the need is still here and many of the same challenges remain, but there has been some progress and there is hope for a breakthrough. This paper starts by providing a candid evaluation of a number of initiatives in most of which the author has been involved, to reflect on what went well and what went wrong. A conclusion is that while there is an opportunity to have a positive impact, the big challenge is to create something sustainable and scalable. It is proposed that current advances in technology may be creating an environment conducive to change, which in turn opens up the possibility of small initiatives having a large impact by “going viral”. This is discussed in the last section, which poses questions to stimulate discussion about possible enabling factors. ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES ACROSS ACADEMIC LEVELS AND DISCIPLINES The examples in this section illustrate how technology has been used in Kenya to improve motivation and results in statistics. There may be advantages to cutting across academic levels (Stern, 2013) so examples include initiatives in schools, diploma programs, undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. All cases demonstrate both the potential impact of technology on statistics education in Kenya and the difficulties of scaling or even sustaining these initiatives. The sequence of influence from one project to the next illustrates the progress that has been made. Agriculture Undergraduates at University of Nairobi Just over ten years ago the Biometry unit at the University of Nairobi started its integration of computers into the statistics education of its agriculture students. Through lots of hard work, a computer lab of refurbished machines, negotiations with statistical software providers, integration of real problems into the curriculum and work on customising an electronic statistics text book, CAST (Stirling, 2005), it was able to get truly remarkable results. Agriculture students were citing statistics as their favorite subject! Given the success of this initiative, those who developed it felt that it was important to spread the methods to other Kenyan universities. In ICOTS 8 they presented their work, concluding that it was now possible for a determined Kenyan lecturer to bring technology into their teaching (Kurji, McDermott, Stern, & Stern, 2010). Unfortunately the levels of determination needed to maintain the gains proved too much. The group was unable to expand and computers were difficult to keep running over long periods of time. It proved near impossible to replace either computers or ICOTS9 (2014) Invited Paper Stern In K. Makar, B. de Sousa, & R. Gould (Eds.), Sustainability in statistics education. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS9, July, 2014), Flagstaff, Arizona, USA. Voorburg, The Netherlands: International Statistical Institute. iase-web.org [© 2014 ISI/IASE]