CourseSmart E-Textbooks Monitor Student Reading Habits
April 10th, 2013In technofascist America, E-books read you.
Via: New York Times:
Several Texas A&M professors know something that generations of teachers could only hope to guess: whether students are reading their textbooks.
They know when students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, not bothering to take notes — or simply not opening the book at all.
“It’s Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent,” said Tracy Hurley, the dean of the school of business.
The faculty members here are neither clairvoyant nor peering over shoulders. They, along with colleagues at eight other colleges, are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up, CourseSmart, that allows them to track their students’ progress with digital textbooks.
Major publishers in higher education have already been collecting data from millions of students who use their digital materials. But CourseSmart goes further by individually packaging for each professor information on all the students in a class — a bold effort that is already beginning to affect how teachers present material and how students respond to it, even as critics question how well it measures learning. The plan is to introduce the program broadly this fall.
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CourseSmart is owned by Pearson, McGraw-Hill and other major publishers, which see an opportunity to cement their dominance in digital textbooks by offering administrators and faculty a constant stream of data about how students are doing.
From a philosophical standpoint I find this objectionable, but in practice I don’t think it’s going to make much of a difference. Overworked professors trying to publish, speak at conferences, teach too many classes etc. hardly have the time or interest to check on each student’s reading habits. College is supposed to be where students take charge of their learning as adults. Do the reading, or don’t, all that matters is how you perform on papers and tests. In aggregate knowing whether or not students are doing the reading is interesting and maybe useful to professors, but I don’t see this resulting in any significant loss of liberties. I mean, the kids are already carrying smartphones, using Facebook, and getting online through the college network.