Kno Introduces Analytics Tool for Student use with Electronic Textbooks

The popular electronic textbook provider is always working to bring etexts to the next level.

Kno ^[2] CEO and founder Osman Rashid spent some time with me last week providing insights into Kno’s latest innovation, which is being unveiled today at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show ^[3] in Las Vegas. The new “Kno Me” tool provides a personal study dashboard for students that gives them insights into their study habits and behaviors while using electronic text books. Rashid explains, “Kno Me is a like a personal learning GPS that helps you locate where you are in your studies and where you need to go”.

The Kno Difference
The use of digital textbooks will eventually overtakes the traditional paper textbook market, and the number of providers in the marketplace continues to grow. Kno strives to differentiate itself from the pack by providing a higher level of interactivity within the etexts, and by offering additional functionality like the Kno Me utility.

Following are a few of the features ^[4] and concepts that Kno brings to the digital textbook experience to deliver a more robust etextbook experience than other vendors:

• “Doing more with less time” is at the core of their philosophy, and is enabled through ideas like a powerful textbook search engine, being able to get your professors and friends notes from right within the ebook, “smart links”, and more.
• Flash cards are automatically created for all glossary items (for all books that have them).
• “Smartlinks “can be added anywhere within any textbook by a teacher, enabling the easy context-associated sharing of videos, web pages, and other web-enabled content.
• Student can create their own study guides with Kno’s Journaling capabilities.
• Kno textbooks synch across the cloud, so you can access your etext from multiple devices and still leverage much of the unique functionality Kno offers.
• And let’s not forgot the new Kno Me tool introduced today …

Leading the Way with Innovations like “Kno Me”
I was particularly intrigued to learn about Kno Me because Analytics are an emerging education technology and academia and the ed tech industry are striving to understand how to better leverage this concept. The team at Kno is working to get ahead of the curve.

Here we see a screen shot of a Kno Me study session report:

^[5]

As you can see, Kno Me provides insights such as:

• How much time have I spent reading the etext over the indicated time period?
• How many pages did I read?
• How many annotations did I make?
• What has my usage been over the last few weeks or months (graph)

The study insights available from Kno Me are based on Kno’s proprietary analytics platform.

One particularly powerful function enabled through the tool is the ability to see how your reading and studying patterns compare to others. If friends who are excelling (or struggling) in the course are willing to share access to their usage history, you can see how your study habits compare. This idea leverages the evolving education technology concept of social learning.

Kno Me is available on all Kno interactive textbooks for iPad, Windows 8, and web browsers and will soon be available for Android and Windows 7.

Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
Social Learning With Social Networking Tools Designed Just For Education ^[6]
Learning All About Electronic Textbooks In A Video Interview With CourseSmart CMO Jill Ambrose ^[7]
Making BYOD Work in Schools – Three School Districts That Have Figured it Out ^[6]