Introducing E-Textbooks that can report on a student’s reading habits. Marc Perry blogs at Wired Campus on this new fad at some colleges.
CourseSmart, which sells digital versions of textbooks by big publishers, announced on Wednesday a new tool to help professors and others measure students’ engagement with electronic course materials.
When students use print textbooks, professors can’t track their reading. But as learning shifts online, everything students do in digital spaces can be monitored, including the intimate details of their reading habits.
Those details are what will make the new CourseSmart service tick. Say a student uses an introductory psychology e-textbook. The book will be integrated into the college’s course-management system. It will track students’ behavior: how much time they spend reading, how many pages they view, and how many notes and highlights they make. That data will get crunched into an engagement score for each student.
If this takes off at college – how long do you think it’ll be for it to come to a high school near you?
Not long at all–Ed Secretary Arne Duncan wants digital textbooks in all classrooms in 7 years.
Oh *wonderful* hopefully they all won’t have this capability, but I’m sure they will. They haven’t seen a student data mining activity they didn’t like.
That looks expensive.
Which is probably why they want to offer it– simple e-texts aren’t.
I wouldn’t expect this to get too big for general use.
Hope you’re right… but watch and see Bill Gates & Company provide a grant for purchasing them.
I’m so glad I finished school before this was created!