Professors Can Now Check and See If You’re Actually Reading the Textbooks

How have they developed this terrible power? It all comes down to a technology called CourseSmart, which has taken root at Texas A&M and was probably thought up by George Orwell, who considered it too extreme to include in 1984. From the New York Times:

Several Texas A&M professors know something that generations of teachers could only hope to guess: whether students are reading their textbooks.

They know when students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, not bothering to take notes — or simply not opening the book at all.

“It’s Big Brother, sort of, but with a good intent,” said Tracy Hurley, the dean of the school of business.

The faculty members here are neither clairvoyant nor peering over shoulders. They, along with colleagues at eight other colleges, are testing technology from a Silicon Valley start-up, CourseSmart, that allows them to track their students’ progress with digital textbooks.

Major publishers in higher education have already been collecting data from millions of students who use their digital materials. But CourseSmart goes further by individually packaging for each professor information on all the students in a class — a bold effort that is already beginning to affect how teachers present material and how students respond to it, even as critics question how well it measures learning. The plan is to introduce the program broadly this fall.

 

I kind of want to know more about this ridiculousness. Are you in a class with CourseSmart? Email me: andy@brobible.com.

[H/T: BetaBeatMale college student image via Shutterstock]