A Mobile Computing Based Attendance System and Students' Attitude Study

Fei Chen, Jianqiang Li, Zhiqiang Wang

Abstract: Contribution: This paper proposes a new attendance system for college education. Compared with existing attendance systems, the proposed system is more user friendly. It is faster yet accurate and cheating-proof. It supports more management capabilities for instructors to analyze students' attendance. It also incurs smaller cost compared with hardware (e.g., campus identity card) based approaches. Students also showed positive support for the proposed system in one semester field trial. Background: Attendance systems are likely to increase stu-dents' academic performance, which has been reported in existing researches. Traditional attendance systems either rely on calling a name roll or on swiping some hardware to check attendance. These approaches are time consuming or hard/expensive to maintain the system. The wide adoption of smart phones opens a new angel to design a more friendly and more efficient attendance system. Research Questions: How to leverage existing, wide-spread computing infrastructure (e.g. a mobile phone, a mobile app, network connections) to design a user-friendly attendance sys-tem? What are students' attitudes on such a system? Methodology: We first designed, implemented, and open-sourced a mobile phone based lightweight attendance system. The proposed system reports attendance by scanning a QR code. We then deployed the system and used the proposed system in two classes throughout one semester for first-year college students. We later conducted a survey on students' attitude on the proposed system and their willingness to use the proposed system. Finding: Attendance systems using mobile technology are much faster than traditional attendance taking. One attendance checking is able to finish in 1 minute with same accuracy and cheating resistance. Students also showed positive feedbacks on the proposed system. The positive feedbacks seem due to two reasons from the survey. One is that the proposed system is more efficient than traditional systems. Another is that the proposed system is also easy to use.