Expert: E-textbooks allow students to check their knowledge right away

Using e-textbooks students can check their knowledge right away, CEO of Magna Carta College Oxford Vadzim Tsitou said during a roundtable session on high technologies in education on 8 April, BelTA has learnt.

“An electronic textbook is not only meant to increase interactivity, it also offers a number of tools that allow students to test their knowledge right away. In fact, we are speaking about a testing environment that should be integrated in learning materials and should be used to check how students mastered the material and tell them what things they need to pay more attention to,” he said.

According to Vadzim Tsitou, this will help students to study more efficiently. If certain requirements are met, an electronic textbook can be considered a textbook, he is convinced.

Head of Microsoft in Belarus Irina Maximova said that technologies in the form of electronic textbooks help improve the quality of the learning process. “I agree that this can be used as a basis for building up many other things, including knowledge assessment and creativity. These are the additional benefits offered by modern technologies,” she underlined.

Chief specialist for education solutions for Central and Eastern Europe at Microsoft Europe Rainer Remer informed that Microsoft invests billions of dollars in the development of new learning tools. “It is not only tablets, but also new kinds of devices, like glasses, interactive watches, just to name a few. Today competition between universities leads to a situation when a student is treated like a client by a university and it is a student who decides what kind of services a university should provide,” the expert underlined.

Rainer Remer noted that the population in the West is aging; the number of young people is decreasing; therefore competition for young employees is getting tougher. For example, companies from Germany and the United States invite more and more people from other countries. “The preference is given to those countries that offer great educational opportunities and use high technologies,” the expert believes.