And?

Adrian Guardia, a Texas A&M instructor in management, took notice the other day of a student who was apparently doing well. His quiz grades were solid, and so was what CourseSmart calls his "engagement index." But Mr. Guardia also saw something else: that the student had opened his textbook only once.

So he's either cheating, or the textbook is worthless. I'm guessing the textbook is worthless.

"It was one of those aha moments," said Mr. Guardia... I knew I had to reach out to him to discuss his studying habits."

Why? If he's doing well in the class, obviously his studying habits are working for him. How about reaching out to the students that are having real problems.

"Maybe the course is too easy and I need to challenge them a bit more," Mr. Guardia said. "Or maybe the textbooks are not as good as I thought."

UTFA.

/Last sentence of the article?  Damn, talk about "burying the lead!"

This isn't new.

If your school uses Blackboard or Desire2Learn as a learning management system, your instructor can see how often you log in, how much time you spend looking at the material they have posted for you to read., whether you are participating in the integrated forums and how often you are replying to others in the class, etc...

It sounds like the textbook industry trying to jump on and play down a metric that could show that that textbooks don't mean a damn and that their prices cannot possibly be justified.  FYI  If you have a good instructor, you will never need a textbook.  Also, if you have a sh*tty instructor, that book isn't going to help you unless you mentally cut that useless meat sack of a professor loose and learn on your own.

Well, teacher, it's like this. I gots the hard copy version of dat book "English Studies for American Students". It's da same book dat my fodder had when he was attending the school here. So I was readin' dat book and studyin' de grammars like yews told me to. I was jus' using dat book with da pages. Not the book with the lectricity.

They can't tell if students read. They can only tell if the student had the appropriate files open for specified periods of time. Of course I didn't read the article, so maybe they are using eye movement imaging or cortical electrodes.

But is it for The Greater Good?

FTFA:  "Maybe the course is too easy and I need to challenge them a bit more," Mr. Guardia said. "Or maybe the textbooks are not as good as I thought."

Yes.

NorthernMT: So let me see if I understand this.

Students today are paying for textbooks.
They are probably being forced to pay a premium to buy them in ebook form.
And just to reward them for it, they get to voluntarily give their professors the right to monitor their reading activities.

And as a wonderful coup de grace, they probably can't even recoup ten bucks of their investment at the end of the term, because they have only bought a license to the book and not the book itself.  Then to make it worse, if they are part of the one percent who hold onto their books as reference manuals, then they will probably lose it later when they switch devices due to DRM.

Calibre. If I purchase a book, it gets a run through this program and stored in a folder on my computer.

I hate to say this, but I never read a single book assigned to me in my entire run of high school English class. Just followed the in class discussion on each chapter and bullshiatted my way through the exams. I also used to make up books for my book reports. It wasn't because I didn't read books recreationally, I loved sci-fi and fantasy. I just found it really thrilling to make up an author and a novel and get away with it. Usually our book reports came in threes so I'd write one book report on a book I'd actually read, and then I'd write two book reports on phony books by imaginary authors.

I don't think I'd be able to get away with that now a days with the internet. But as a small town boy if you had a good imagination you could get away with it no problem.