12 ms·
What if they read a course book for a different course? What if a werewolf steals their ebook reader? What if the student can only read Ancient Hebrew? Edge cas
by grkvlt 12y ago
What if they read a course book for a different course? What if a werewolf steals their ebook reader? What if the student can only read Ancient Hebrew? Edge cases are fun...!
The first two points are just asking what happens if you don't use the software. The answer is, surprisingly, you don't get the benefits of the software. The third point is slightly more interesting, but still irrelevant. This sort of thing is not designed to help students who are gifted enough to pass a course without reading the textbook. It is pretty obviously meant for those who need the textbook to learn, and will help those students and their teachers by showing which parts they struggled with, perhaps even unconsciously, and so on. Previously the only way to gain this sort of in-depth information about a student's learning habits was by one-on-one tutoring, following along as the student reads the material and answering questions as they come up. This is obviously an expensive process, although worthwhile, so automating it cheaply is a good thing,
- pjscott 12y ago> This sort of thing is not designed to help students who are gifted enough to pass a course without reading the textbook. It will inevitably be used to hassle those students, though. You know an easy way to make unusually smart students hate school? Just try to impose a time-consuming, slow, one-size-fits-all study schedule on them by force.
- grkvlt 12y agoNo. It will not inevitably be used like that. It may through short-sighted and wrong-headed thinking be used like that. I quite definitely is not intended to be used like that. Let's judge things on their intent, rather than hypothetical ways they can be abused. This sort of thing is designed to prevent one-size-fits-all schedules, while still managing to report and analyse the effectiveness of the material. Without analytics and metrics we have just been guessing, so technologies like active textbooks are going to give an amazing amount of insight into the best way to design courses to benefit the maximum number of students. We no longer have to worry about the smartest kids getting ahead of the class and becoming bored and disruptive, because their textbooks will download extra material designed to be of interest and use to them, for which they will receive additional credit. And so on...