Tips to Track student attendance during online learning

In every memory related to school, attendance is a crucial part of them. The daily roll calls, roll numbers, balancing minimum attendance were all crucial to school education. Things have not changed very much, attendance remains a crucial part of the school education system, but new challenges have arisen. Demand for more streamlined systems is rising, technology with better accuracy, and especially one that cannot be cheated. These demands are taken care of perfectly by a student attendance management system.

A student attendance management system is used to track student attendance accurately, lowering the burden on teachers, keeping track of daily attendance, and also keeping track of individual class attendance. This meticulous method of operation of such a system ensures individual attention to classroom attendance of students. Some colleges have taken to issuing RFID tags to students at school entrances that keep track of their attendance in college. Newer systems have resorted to using the services of an app for taking attendance. For example, an app called a white hat can be used to track the student location on the campus using a combination of GPS and Bluetooth services. Students do not even require to register their attendance, the app does the service for them. This online attendance tracker does not need a physical presence; the attendance data is stored in clouds that can be accessed as per the requirement of either parent or authorized school staff.

Attendance is seen as a mundane chore by both students and staff of any institution, but attendance is a crucial part of the functioning of a system. These records show how productive a student or staff has been throughout the period toward achieving the goal of the organization. The record can act as a metric that denotes the level of dedication of the individual to his/her duty or profession. It reduces absenteeism, but most importantly it enforces habit and character. Just as important as student attendance is the teacher’s attendance to complete any functioning system.

The benefits of using an attendance management system are immense for the management of any institution. The system not only tracks the daily attendance, but it also tracks individual class attendance. The system data is automatically updated and can be programmed to show discrepancies, events such as a particular student skipping a particular class can be notified and the problem can be addressed. Another advantage of such a system is the sheer ability to share information, parents of students can track the attendance data of students and constantly monitor the student attendance for discrepancies as well. Student attendance tracking software also enables the sharing of data such as grades, student performance thus also helps in feedback. 

Online learning has introduced new challenges to attendance tracking, while modern methods such as connectivity using Bluetooth and GPS can be used in a physical college setting, for schools and colleges that have gone online for classes new methods have to be introduced. Here are a few tips that may help improve student presence for classes:

Student attendance management systems provide a vast array of options to school management and students to ensure easier processing of school attendance and better analysis of the information. The purchase of such services ensure more than adequate returns for the investment made in these platforms and contribute towards improving the productivity, creativity, and engagement. The exercise of tracking school attendance is as old as any education system, the technology has helped leapfrog the benefits even further, be it for students, teachers, or the management.

1. Abrupt attendance taking – to ensure that students just don’t give attendance and go do their thing away from the screen, take attendance at random intervals in the lecture.
2. Attendance more than once – lecturers may take attendance more than once during a lecture to keep students in the classroom. This would also help in keeping the students more attentive in class.
3. Registering the MAC Id of the system the students can connect to classes in – this would help the students not sharing the class link with outsiders, which has caused unwanted disturbances in classes, also ensuring students would not wander during classes.
4. Use student attendance tracking software – ERP software, such as Campus365 enables attendance tracking and sharing of information with parents and management. This can also be used to constantly update student information that may benefit from the learning process. Such as, if a student finds it difficult to learn a particular subject through the online mode, the student data can be analyzed and information passed on to the parents and teachers to help guide the student further. ERP systems such as this provide a vast array of services that can benefit online virtual classroom lectures.
5. Unique ID for attendance – Attendance tracking software can be programmed to provide students with unique IDs for attendance, thus reduce the possibility of proxy attendance. These IDs can be provided before the commencement of classes to individual contact of these students so that attendance can be marked only through these unique ID’s.
6. Using an app for taking attendance – apps can use student GPS to track the location of students to ensure that location consistency is maintained by the student.
7. Engaging students in classroom activity – the most effective way to track student activity is through engaging the student in-class activities. Various virtual classroom platforms provide tools that enable the educators to take control of the student’s attention and provide these facilities to students that can help in increasing the engagement of students with the classroom sessions they are attending.