The digital education market is thriving like never before. MOOCs have garnered most of the attention, helped no doubt by evidence such as that released last week showing that students studying via MOOC style learning did waaaay better than those studying via regular methods.
Whilst MOOCs utilise pure online delivery channels, the web is stretching its tentacles into even the most staid of areas. The humble text book has been a staple of the classroom for hundreds of years. As with many analogue technologies however, it remained unclear to teachers whether students were actually using them to swot up or not, at least until test time.
Silicon Valley start-up CourseSmart is aiming to change all of that however. The company, owned by Pearson and several other large publishers, makes digital textbooks. Unlike their analogue cousins however, these text books allow teachers to see exactly how often they’ve been read by students.
The new text books are being trialled at eight colleges in the US to see whether they help provide better results. The ebooks give each student an engagement score, which is based on the number of times the book was opened, how long it was open for, how many pages were read, whether sections were highlighted and so on.
Whilst these may be useful metrics, they are pretty straightforward to game. The value of the data will only be as strong as the quality of it, and if students are learning to game the system then it will quickly lose any value it may have had.
“The possibilities of harm are tremendous if teachers are naïve enough to think these scores mean anything for the vast majority of students,” Professor Dede from Harvard said.
I can’t help but think that such technologies are more useful to the publishers than they are to either teachers or students. After all, the data is also being fed back to publishers, giving them insight into how their books are being consumed. With the technology being used in a number of schools however it won’t be long before some clear data emerges as to the success or otherwise of the technology.
What do you think? Is it useful for your teachers to have this kind of data or is it an invasion of your privacy?
This is a rubbish idea imo. Forget the privacy implications, I just can't see it having any useful purposes. I mean how can they tell who opened the text book? Daft.
There is no evidence that highlighting a digital textbook improves learning or comprehension. We need real studies of what digital tools improve outcomes before we mandate them. Highlighting has no place in a Google world.
I think is going to happen more and more whether we like it or not. With technology becoming digital the ability to track what happens will exist, and it's unreasonable to expect companies not to make use of that. Whether it's of any use in the classroom of course is a completely different matter.
I can't really see the point from either a teacher or a students point of view.
It's great for a business manager, or text book committee. If textbook x is "used" 100x more often than y. You never buy y again. If pilot group z is being used more than x, ditch x, etc.
OR if teacher x uses textbook only 1/2 as much as other teachers, and teacher x consistently has poor scores – that's a coaching tool.
There's 100 ways this could be used to make better decisions as an administrator.