I can easily imagine students rigging their reader with activity simulators.
I wonder which faculty will fall for such useless misguided control trip.
If this had existed when I was in high school, I definitely would have spent hours writing scripts to automate interaction with the ebook, and more hours trying to reverse engineer their private API for phoning home with the 'engagement' data....before subsequently failing the test.
I ended up in IT, and I routinely tell people how I failed a midterm in Intro to C++, I had to wind out like a 30 line C++ function with arrays and pointers tracing and writing out the correct cout<< output, only in the last five minutes of that midterm realize I made one trivial error like on the third of these thirty steps.
And so a score of 68 it was. But my god did I love Solaris, g++, and the Unix way well after that.
If I wanted a CS degree I had to sit thru night school "what is an IP address" class even if during the day time I had a fat stack of current Cisco certs.
If the reason were collected and analyzed, it might be the case the prof A doesn't actually speak English or is utterly incompetent about the topic, so the kids are self teaching (true story from my youth!)
Now there may be anecdotal verbal end-of-semester survey results, but thats just meaningless prose from kids, but the number of hours of video watched is a number, therefore it is meaningful...
If your goal is to pass tests you're missing out on the point of education. Which is to learn stuff (usually, at least).
The tests are the metric that we measure success with, they are not the goal. Confuse the two and you will most likely continue to confuse the two and you will find yourself writing extra lines of code or whatever metric you're going to confuse for a goal in your professional life as well.
Used right, this could replace part of the focus of tests and instead put the focus on learning. Which is way better. Used wrong, it could become another metric that people want to maximise, because they've confused the metric with the goal.
Metrics are indicators of success/failure, they are not success/failure, so if you try to optimise towards metrics you ultimately just screw yourself.
Use quantitative metrics to identify areas of greatest opportunity, qualitatively inspect and analyse to improve. Repeat. That's the most effective way I know of learning. Used that way, metrics are useful, and having more metrics is good, not bad.
True for the student, but true for the professor too... Why produce a bogus metric such as reading assiduity ?
If simply dumped in front of school teachers and administrators, I suspect it would be harmful. The data will simply reinforce biases those people already have about certain students.
Interestingly, the data could be turned around on the teachers as well. A teacher may be so effective that students can pass courses without reading the material. Administrators might not recognize the astounding ability of the teacher and instead interpret it as a teacher handing out easy As.
Plus it's really not a good metric. There are many ways to learn a topic. There's fast learners, those who gather information trough other sources, those who like to work in groups. Inevitably these approaches to learning will get hindered by myopic interpretation of this metric.
There's an implicit assumption there--consider that there is decent evidence that modern schooling (periods, bells, etc.) is a direct product of the need for factory shift workers.
There is no inherent good (from the government point of view--local, state, or federal) in teaching about freedom.
I really don't understand this attitude. Of course this will not work if it is used incorrectly. Why would you expect any different? However, the same can be said for normal course work. What if the teacher gets the students to read only the first word of each sentence? This shows books will never work, and lecturing is the only way to teach.
Putting that aside, the point is that as you say, there are many ways to learn a topic. Asking children how they best learn things is not going to get useful answers most of the time, but analysis of reading and research patterns using sophisticated data mining or ML software will allow teachers to segment their students into groups that all learn in a similar way. So everyone benefits.
As I suggest above, I'd go further than instrumenting the ebooks. If they are on a tablet device using the Internet, then instrument the browser too, and you can correlate Wikipedia and Google searches with whatever page of the textbook they were on, and see what topics are unclear and always need additional research. You would also find out which students are deeply interested in the topic, as they read on past the end of the assignment, and download extra information or search for related topics. And you can discipline those who never open the book a all, and spend all their time looking at amusing cat pictures.
With such power there is also a responsibility to manage the student's privacy appropriately, bout with a school-provided device, similar to a work laptop, they should have no expectation of absolute privacy anyway. I think any worries about monitoring pale into insignificance against the powerful augmented learning regimes that can be created, and a suitable auditing and management routine will prevent any abuse.
If you want to collect metrics then make them as a personal tool. Make a utility for the student, that only him can access, that helps him learn about his studying patterns, give him hints, ... If they want to share them it's on their own term.
Well, looks like the US education system has already failed on your second sentence.
Perhaps there is an alternative explanation for the rampant misuse of metrics observed in most modern education systems? One that doesn't involve gross incompetence, I hope.