Digital Textbooks might be able to tell if you did your work.

CourseSmart offers an education package to schools that allows professors to monitor what their students read in their textbooks as well as the passages they highlight according to a report from the New York Times.

CourseSmart acts as a provider of digital textbooks working with publishers like McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and John Wiley and Sons. The NY Times describes books in use at Texas A&M University, which present an “engagement index” to professors that can be used to evaluate students’ performance in class.

This will be another method the University and Instructors will be able to gauge why a student might be having problems in the course. It will tell them whether they have opened the digital textbook and what pages they have viewed, when they viewed them and how much time they spent reading the textbook.

So the question is going to be is how accurate this information will be in reporting back the students’ “engagement index”. Can the system be gamed and what assumptions does the software make in determining the index. Also, how does the software determine between someone studying really hard from one that is just plain clueless and in a panic trying to catch up on things they either don’t understand

Either way this is going into full gear next fall and it will interesting to see what the results will be. I think that if handled right it could be an effective tool learning more about the quality of the class content, instructor lectures and how much work is actually done by the student. All of these factors contribute to learning process.

For more info on CourseSmart click here…