Students May be Getting Smart Books That Know if Your’e Studying or Not
It’s always been a challenge to monitor a child’s study habits, however next year, some parents and teachers will be getting help from new books that know if a child is studying or not.
CourseSmart, a digital course materials provider, allows teachers to track students’ ebook progress. Using CourseSmart Analytics, faculty can measure engagement with materials, including how long someone’s been reading, average page views and how often notes are taken.
The goal is to help teachers assess which students are at risk for falling behind and pinpoint their study habits early on. By using the analytics in conjunction with other factors like class participation, quizzes and assignments, they can work with class members to improve performance, explains marketing senior vice president Cindy Clarke.
“In college it’s very easy to fall behind quickly, especially in classes that are heavy on reading,” Clarke tells Digital Afro.
“Here, the instructor will see if students are actually consuming the assigned material and intervention can make the difference whether they stay in class.”
“Here, the instructor will see if students are actually consuming the assigned material and intervention can make the difference whether they stay in class.”
The software works with CourseSmart ebooks, which collaborate with major educational publishers like Pearson, McGraw Hill-Education and Cengage Learning. Teachers have access to a dashboard where they can monitor individual students’ engagement.
Analytic data points are especially beneficial for professors with large lecture classes, where the instructor can’t interact with every single participant. The dashboard can let teachers view at a glance students with the lowest engagement levels as well as the highest.
How often students open a book isn’t the sole indicator of their success in the classroom, which is why Clarke recommends the system as an enhancement to other classroom measurements. There are always going to be those who do well on tests without cracking open the ebook, but analytics aren’t necessarily meant for that group.
“People have different study habits. Some read the ebook but take handwritten notes, and there’s no real way to track that,” Clarke says.
“The analytics are one measure of engagement but shouldn’t be taken in isolation.”
“The analytics are one measure of engagement but shouldn’t be taken in isolation.”
CourseSmart’s materials operate via a cloud service, so every time users access a new page, it’s tracked in the same way as web page views.
A lot of students are always on the lookout for easy ways around assignments, whether it’s SparkNotes or increasing the font size on 10-page papers. Skimming pages on CourseSmart materials could easily skew the system, but the company says they are working on improving their metrics to prevent runaway scores. Students can also opt out of being tracked.
Aside from teachers using analytics to improve the classroom, publishers are also at an advantage with the collected data. They’ll be able to see how their books are being consumed, and if a particular chapter is constantly being overlooked, publishers can identify why and update the material.
What do you think of tracking students’ digital reading? Let us know in the comments.
I think its an awesome idea.