While digital textbooks are emerging across the globe for students of every educational level, leading educational software company Kno is already introducing improvements to what the industry already envisions as a quality, fully-interactive e-textbook. With the upcoming launch of Kno Me later today, students will have a visual dashboard of how effective their learning strategies and study time have been, as well as the option to follow their classmates’ study activity to see how and how much they should study in order to have a comparative effectiveness. This dashboard will allow students to engage with their own patterns of learning behavior in an on-going basis, ideally before their grades are finalized.
Students can check in frequently with each Kno textbook they use to see the time spent reading, the notes they’ve taken, the flashcards they’ve mastered, which really helps them monitor their progress and have more insight into their learning behavior and how they’re studying,” said Osman Rashid, CEO and co-founder of Kno, in an interview with GoodeReader. “Students have no way of knowing about their study effectiveness until it’s too late. Kno Me makes them more self-aware so they can focus on the right things at the right time.”
The dashboard course manager is a part of each textbook put out by Kno. The Kno Me dashboard also incorporates a somewhat social reading approach to the studying that allows students to request to follow their classmates and track their progress in relation to students they may know.
“Students can request to follow another student in the class, or they can invite others to follow them. This gives students insight into how other students in the class are studying the material. This begins to help students fine tune their study behaviors and manage their study time wisely,” continued Rashid. “We believe engagement is a leading indicator of performance, and the more the student is engaged with the content and knows how to study the content, the better outcome he or she will have.”
Some of the metrics tracked by Kno Me include how many pages have been read, how many annotations have been taken, how many items have been bookmarked, and how many glossary terms have been mastered. Once this information is compiled for the student, the students can receive “smart alerts,” which let the students know areas of their textbook which they may need to spend more time on when they study.
“We tried to create a simple product they can use to track their patterns. To start, we wanted to keep this simple and straightforward to get students used to the concept, and from there we can go forward.”
Kno Me will be an integral part of all Kno textbooks, which are available for iPad, Windows 8, and web browsers, with Android and Windows 7 compatibility coming soon.
Mercy Pilkington is a Senior Editor for Good e-Reader. She is also the CEO and founder of a hybrid publishing and consulting company.
