The Digital Reader

Here’s some news which will sound oddly familiar to those of us with long memories. Kno has just put out a press release announcing the launch of a new analytics dashboard which students can use to track their reading and study habits. It’s called Kno Me, and Kno is hoping that students will be able to use the dashboard to improve their study habits and thus learn more from their classwork.

It’s going to work with all the textbooks sold by Kno and is available on all Kno interactive textbooks for iPad, Windows 8, and web browsers and will soon be available for Android and Windows 7.
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Way back in January I was inspired by the launch of iBooks Author to post on how poor students will get left behind in the so-called digital textbook revolution. I lamented that school districts with limited funds  won’t be able to take advantage of the benefits of digital textbooks (I still believed in the hype back then) because of the sometimes expensive hardware costs.

Recent events now suggest that the bar for adopting digital textbooks is a lot higher than I expected, and it turns out that even a well-to-do suburb of D.C. can face insurmountable issues – ones so bad that they have to go back to paper textbooks.
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I’m not one to like the widespread tracking of students’ study habits but there are times where it can turn up some interesting info about how students are really using the newfangled digital textbooks.

The following study from Luther College is one such. A total of 61 college freshman used a new interactive Intro to Programming textbook in the Fall of 2011. The textbook was written by the 2 professors teaching the class, and this study marks the first release of any study data on how the textbook is being used.

Based on the paper released last week I don’t think the students used their digital textbooks all too much differently from how they would have used paper textbooks (and related course materials).
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Phase 2 involves using the camera on your tablet to track your behavior.

Earlier this week CourseSmart, which sells digital versions of textbooks by big publishers, gave students a new reason to value anonymity. They announced a new set of analytics tools which will enable professors and instructors to see the reading habits of their students.
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Flat World Knowledge is one of a bunch of companies trying to reform the textbook industry,and one thing that sets them apart is that they let students access online versions of their textbooks for free.

Unfortunately, that free access is about to end. Starting next January, students will no longer be read their assigned textbooks on the Flat World Knowledge website.
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The cost of textbooks increases every year far faster than inflation, and that is a problem which affects digital textbooks as well as paper. And now it seems the textbook publishers are proposing a new solution.

CourseSmart, which BTW is wholly owned by a consortium of textbook publishers, announced a new pilot program yesterday. They are inviting up to 20 universities to participate in the pilot.
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The cost of textbooks is a perennial problem in colleges as students seek to cut costs while publishers keep raising prices. A new pilot program promises to find a way reduce cost by organizing volume purchases  of digital textbooks.

eCampus News covers this story in depth, but tl:dr version is that 28 universities will be partnering with McGraw-Hill this fall for a new digital textbook pilot. The universities will be paying a fee to get a site license certain digital textbooks provided by McGraw-Hill. The fall 2012 pilot program follows on a similar but smaller pilot in Spring 2012 involving the UC Berkeley, Cornell, the University of Minnesota, UVA, and the University of Wisconsin.
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