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Are students families aware of this?

That's kind of scary because kids are learning to be policed from a young age. Might be easier to convince them in the future that it's an acceptable behavior to be officially profiled by third parties. Even if this third party is a school teacher, it's absolutely NOT okay.

I understand the eagerness to monitor and try to help the student as much as possible, but a teacher or a school committee should understand the repercussions of this kind of monitoring, no matter what the results are.




Here's the product page for CourseSmart Analytics[0], the product referred to in the link.

By my read it's just as bad as the OP suggests; the screenshots even show specific students' names with their "engagement index".

An aggregated view of student engagement seems like it would be quite useful, e.g. "hmm, only 5% of my students are spending more than a minute looking at this really important chart, I should emphasize it in my next lecture". But Panopticon-style policing, and as you say, comfort with that policing -- shudder.

(edit - fixed product name)

[0]: http://instructors.coursesmart.com/go/institutions/analytics


Yeah, as a tool for improving coursework, it sounds great. Too easy to abuse, though :(


You may have discovered fire. Makes things warm.

Pretty easy to abuse.


So now we're going to call grading "policing"?

I'm not sure what line I crossed to get so many downvotes, but I really don't understand why this is outrageous.

Can someone please explain for me why we're fighting a school for measuring user interaction and adjusting based on that data?


There is a huge difference between "discovering if the student learned the lesson" and "verifying that the student behaves in the school aproved manner". The first is named "grading", and the last "policing".

Both must be done for some degree, but that degree vary widely.


Part of the American War on Education.




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