A 'Moneyball' Approach to College
chronicle.com
chronicle.com
If the students don't want to learn something, they aren't going to learn it. Period. They might cram for a test so they won't piss of their parents by seemingly pissing away their money, but that doesn't mean they will have actually gained anything from the classroom experience.
I see them trying two different things: using data in class to get the students to engage with and learn from each other; and using data in aggregate to predict how well students will do.
I don't see how your objection applies to getting students to engage with each other, so I'm going to skip it. I think you're objecting to the second thing. But I don't see it as "it's our fault the students are failing," I see it as "this student is in danger of failing, so we should help them." Blame is irrelevant. In small courses, professors already know who is in danger of not doing well. I think they're targeting larger class sizes where the professor is unable to look at a student and immediately recall their past performance.
You're correct that an unmotivated student will not learn. But even motivated students need help sometimes. Some students have not yet learned how to learn.
The tools are all there and I agree that some good will come out of it. But without a motivation to learn something, I don't see these technologies as being a solution. More of an amplifier of a solution than anything else. Start ups focused around creating technology to measure students seem like a good way to make the above "quadruple click back button for success" scenario play out somehow.
Although, I think that well-timed intervention can help students with motivation problems. Students tend to lose motivation when they're struggling and don't know how to improve.
Of course more variables would be needed and how to weigh them would be different for each student, but from a Moneyball approach payback would probably be one of the strongest factors.
That sounds dubious -- she's taking an indicator of class engagement, and hoping to improve class engagement by changing it. But hey, you never know what may help people. She should send out those emails to half the class, with the other half as a control group.