Your students aren’t reading, what are you going to do about it? If you teach a class with an online textbook linked to CourseSmart, you may soon have the option of checking up on them, whether you use this ability to assign grades, decide whether you’ll answer their questions, or just give helpful advice on study habits. Technology from CourseSmart that is currently undergoing testing at eight schools will allow professors to see a number of things about their students’ reading habits, including an “engagement index” based on whether students had opened each page, how often, how long they’d spent on it, and whether they’d taken electronic notes.
Slate plays up the Big Brother aspect, while Ars Technica focuses on students’ ability to game the engagement index. Perhaps the most telling quote comes at the end of the New York Times article:
After two months of using the system, Mr. Guardia is coming to some conclusions of his own. His students generally are scoring well on quizzes and assignments. In the old days, that might have reassured him. But their engagement indexes are low.
“Maybe the course is too easy and I need to challenge them a bit more,” Mr. Guardia said. “Or maybe the textbooks are not as good as I thought.”
I vote for that.
Memoirs of a SLACer 