<p>"This semester, thousands of college students around the country, including dozens at a Texas A&M University campus, won't be able to hide their studying habits from the prying eyes of their professors.</p>
<p>With the new platform CourseSmart Analytics, professors are able to see the students' level of engagement - how much of digital texts students have read, whether they highlight passages or took notes and how much time they spent on their readings." ...</p>
<p>So every few days I skip through and highlight random passages?<br>
It’s interesting from one angle to determine how textbooks are used as a learning tool but a horrible idea if it gets used as any measure of class participation.
Highlighting passages is already a waste of time to learning according to some studies…so not sure if they’ll find out anything.
How much time spent reading? I used to fall asleep and would have to read the same passages over and over again…will that count?
And it’s nobody’s business what or if I read anything.</p>
<p>This is simply ridiculous. If that is the sort of thing that is considered appropriate for “higher education” at Texas A&M or any other university, then that is a school to avoid.</p>
<p>But I assume that it is just the usual sensationalism. (Why start a thread that is so obviously intended just to stir the pot? We do plenty of pot-stirring on our own, without stuff like this and “How Did HE Get In” garbage. Way to make your users feel manipulated. How dumb do you think we are?)</p>
<p>This is disgusting and really freaking creepy. I don’t learn well from the textbook. When I do read from the textbook, I do NOT highlight or write in them. It does nothing to help me study. I take notes in a notebook. </p>
<p>I agree with Consol. I can’t imagine most professors would care. They have enough to do without tracking your reading times.</p>
<p>It seems to be pointless to track student use of the textbook for the purpose of individual grading.</p>
<p>But it may be of interest after the course is complete to determine whether the use of the textbook was well correlated to student performance in the course. That may help show whether the textbook was actually useful for the course.</p>
<p>ucbalumnus, I agree. It might provide some interesting data on study habits in general. How much time do students really spend reading? How much does the amount of time, or the use of highlighting, correlate to test performance? Do kids who read a bit each day fare better than those who cram last minute? </p>
<p>But I certainly can’t imagine many professors having the time to track hundreds of individual students on a regular basis!</p>
<p>And, may I ask,what are these college classes that use a textbook? I can only think of two or three courses that used an actual “textbook” when I was in college. The rest of them used a variety of original sources and scholarly works. </p>
<p>And I never highlighted or underlined a textbook in my life. Probably because we ceased to use them in HS, even in classes such as US History. We read BOOKS.</p>
<p>Sounds like a crappy piece of software for crappy pseudo-education. IMNSHO. (Feeling curmudgeonly this AM. )</p>
<p>Profs cannot use tests to track if students do the reading, because students will whine if tested on something that was mentioned in the book but not explicitly discussed in class. I approve of this new development.</p>
<p>My daughter is a straight A student who sometimes reads and sometimes does not read the textbook, depending on her workload. Will she get As on the tests but not an A in the class for not doing the busywork of reading a textbook which goes over stuff she learned at another time, or in another way?</p>
<p>I think you are probably a liberal. Do you want to track people electronically? Next employers will track if you do the reading at home.</p>
<p>It’s not a good precedent for many reasons.</p>
<p>Maybe they should use the technology to make sure profs read the papers submitted more than one time before grading it. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>The “variety of original sources and scholarly works” would be the textbooks for such courses. There is no technical reason why they cannot be put into the type of mechanism described here.</p>
<p>Hey wait, PG- I’m a liberal and I think this is a ridiculous idea. I won’t ever get my textbooks in digital form because I want to read them on paper. When profs give us electronic articles, etc., I print them out. What I do with materials electronically has nothing to do with whether I’ve read them or not. </p>
<p>As others mentioned, I have never highlighted a text book or written notes in it. I outline everything I read in notebooks.</p>
<p>I am something of a liberal, and your comparison is odd. Most course syllabi already require that students do all the assigned reading. If you think that’s a silly requirement, then your issue should be there.</p>
<p>I think that students not doing the reading is a bigger problem than professors assigning too much busywork.</p>
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