New e-textbooks are making it harder for students to skip or skim reading assignments:
A startup named CourseSmart now offers an education package to schools that allows professors to, among other things, monitor what their students read in course textbooks as well as passages they highlight. … [P]rofessors attribute students’ low grades to the CourseSmart-provided proof that the student never, or rarely, opened their books. The engagement index shows not only what, but when, students are reading, so if they opt not to peruse the textbook until the day or night before a test, the professor will know.
Pierre Tristam worries about this “policing by data”:
Reading is one of the few truly private activities left us, depending entirely on the isolation created between book and reader, and the way the reader chooses to engage with that book: reading a page over five times, skipping five pages, underlining five lines, cursing at five others. … How you read a textbook is irrelevant. If you’re performing well in class, that’s all that should matter.
Update from a reader:
Speaking as a professor, I imagine you’d have to be pretty bad at your job to use that data to evaluate students. What I mean by that is that a professor has a lot of responsibilities besides teaching, and every minute spent grading is a minute not spent on something else that’s at least equally important. Why waste time looking at data that can only possibly give you a rough assessment of students, when you have other data (homework, exam, participation) that give you a much more direct assessment? I’d only do that if I didn’t have any other responsibilities – but I’d only not have those other responsibilities if I wasn’t a very good professor in the first place.
The Dish 