Figuring out how to teach maths online

INTERVIEW/Ian Finlayson, CyberGrinds: CHAT TO Ian Finlayson about maths for even a few minutes, and it's clear you're talking to a man with a passion – and a mission.

“I was by no means a model student,” recalls Finlayson (34), co-founder of educational website, CyberGrinds.ie, “but maths was always my favourite subject, although I never felt happy about the way it was being taught.”

Looking back, Finlayson believes that at the core of his dissatisfaction was the superficiality of the syllabus: he was told what he had to learn but never why or what relevance it had to the rest of the world.

“I realised that, even when I got good results, I didn’t really understand the theory behind what I’d learned. The people who draw up these courses don’t seem to realise that sometimes pupils need more context – and that sometimes the reason youngsters lose interest is that they’re not given that context.”

By now the discussion has moved on to pi – the mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter in Euclidean space.

“Pi is a good example,” declares Finlayson. “When we all learned about it in school, we were told the basics: it’s a ratio, it’s 3.14 with a decimal representation that never ends or repeats. That’s it. From there on, we used it in mathematical formulas, but we never knew why.

“As a student, I was fascinated by pi, and that was the first time I said to myself: this isn’t enough, I want to know why I’m using pi and what exactly it is. That’s why on CyberGrinds.ie we have a blog dedicated entirely to pi and discussions about it.”

Finlayson, originally a music teacher, who now runs an IT consultancy, set up CyberGrinds with his business partner, Neil McCleane. It does essentially what its name implies – provides online grinds for Junior and Leaving Certificate students.

This year, the grinds are only in maths, overseen by the site’s first teacher, Helen Boothman, who has a master’s in maths and statistics and a higher diploma in education, not to mention 20 years’ of second-level teaching experience in Ireland and Canada.

Finlayson is already looking for teachers of other subjects, planning to widen the curriculum next year. He admits that he doesn’t yet know how well languages will work on the site. But for now, mathematics is his particular crusade. Fifty-five thousand students sat the Leaving Cert in 2008 and of those, “some 5,000 failed maths,” he says.

“That means those students can’t take science subjects later, and it has all sorts of implications for the careers they can choose.”

In business terms, the low cost of using the site should be the key to generating business, he maintains. “Private grinds cost anything up to €45 an hour, whereas with us, for example, you can buy the entire Leaving Certificate maths curriculum for a once-off payment of €99, and any updates afterwards are provided free of charge.

“It’s very interactive. You click on the segment you want to study, and it opens a white board which goes through the topic with a whole range of visual examples and a voiceover by Helen Boothman.

“It mixes audio and video with quizzes and blogs. You can send questions for clarification, and there’s a discussion forum which, I should stress, is very tightly moderated and where every contribution has to be approved.”

Finlayson knows that CyberGrinds will have its critics, particularly on the grounds that it lacks the intense, one-to-one relationship of real grinds.

“The big plus is that the site can be accessed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so students can study when they like . . . instead of setting an hour aside for a tutor once a week. They can use it to supplement ordinary school classes and to learn at their own pace. We give as much as we can, for as little as we can.”

On the record

Name:Ian Finlayson

Company:CyberGrinds

www.cybergrinds.ie

Job:Co-founder

Age:34

Background: Started his career as a music teacher, before switching to his other big love, computers. Worked as a network administrator and IT instructor in the 1990s, before joining First Active as a network engineer.

Moved to Minerva Managed Networks/Galileo Ireland as a senior network engineer, then Interfusion Networks as senior project engineer. A registered consultant with Cisco Systems, he set up IJF Consulting in July 2006, and clients now include the Local Government Computer Services Board.

CyberGrinds.ie, which he set up with business partner, Neil McCleane, went live early this year.

Inspired by:Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Google. "They're the same age and generation as myself, and the company they've built using a mix of IT and business skills is really remarkable. To 'google' has even become a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary."

Challenges:"To give away as much as possible for as little as possible – the diametric opposite of what a lot of other companies try to do."

Most important thing learned so far:How complicated marketing is. "This was a much more complicated project than setting up my IT consultancy. Marketing is hugely important. When you advertise, you see can see a clear increase in interest. But sustaining that profile and that growth is much harder than I realised."