Nowadays, teachers can only guess: whether their students read their textbooks or abstain – this is the opinion of professors from Texas A&M University. They can’t understand whether students miss some pages and don’t think it’s necessary to make notes, or Punctuation practices don’t take a textbook in their hands at all.

“It’s something like Big Brother, only with good intentions,” says Tracy Hurley, Dean of Business School. University professors no longer want to be clairvoyants or look over students’ shoulders. Together with their eight-college colleagues, they are testing a new technology from Silicon Valley, CourseSmart; it will allow students to track their digital textbooks.

Major publishers of educational literature have already collected information on the use of digital teaching materials. But CourseSmart has gone further; it provides the instructor with specific data about each of his students. This allows you to keep track of how the instructor gives the material and what remains in the minds https://argoprep.com/blog/shsat/revision-punctuation-practices-commas/ of students after a lecture.

Adrian Guardia, a management professor at A&M University, noticed that one of the students answers his questions well. The tests also showed good grades; and the CourseSmart program gave a low “participation index”. Yes, the lecturer understands – it is good if a student opened his textbook once.

“It was a moment of truth,” says Guardia. It was a moment of truth,” Guardia says. “It’s his job to control 70 students from three groups. “Do they really think they can learn something if they read a textbook the day before the test? I have to get through to them so they understand that they have to learn differently.

Students see their “participation index” only if the teacher wants to show them. However, they are all aware of it – books follow them. For some, the participation index is a real shock – for example, for 43-year-old Charles Tejeda. The low score on the test meant little to him, but the low participation index surprised him.

“I got caught,” says Tededa. With two jobs and three kids, there’s not much time to learn – Charles can only afford to read a textbook at night. “I guess I’ll have to read it more often https://argoprep.com/blog/singapore-math-vs-common-core-whats-the-difference/ now,” the student admits.

The owners of CourseSmart program are such large publishing houses as Pearson, McGraw-Hill and others. In an effort to consolidate their dominance in the digital textbook market, they offered universities a way to track students’ independent work with a book.

Sometimes teachers could tell by the look on a student’s face whether or not they had learned the material. Now many classes are virtual, including Mr. Guardia’s class. It is difficult for teachers, not seeing the students, to understand how well they worked -CourseSmart will help them in this.