UNIVERSITY STUDENT ATTENDANCE - Keeping a record of who attends class! #universityteaching

New to me this semester is a system designed to allow students to monitor their class attendance. In this video I chat about what the system is, how it will work and my thoughts on keeping a register of lecture attendance!

All views are my own. #drcst #academiclife #university
Music | Start Dust, Infinite; The Stars Fall In

[nicolaheaps]

Huge challenge! For Nursing, our professional body require a minimum number of theory hours over 3 years. So attendance has been required since I was a student nurse 33 years ago.
As a young student nurse, absence was simply not tolerated and obvious! Now we have many students who must attend (hopefully engage too) and pass our assessments to join the NMC register. So, we must monitor attendance.
The attendance code is generated 15 mins or so before a session - students are expected to arrive 10 minutes before a session begins. We have am and pm sessions of 2-3 hours and consider sharing of codes to be counter to professional values -which we monitor through theory and practice. Our students access the NHS Learning Support Fund, which requires attendance.
I would be very interested to see how others manage and evaluate attendance and engagement. xxx

[nursearka]

So many of our classes here in Australia are no longer compulsory to attend. Students often don’t come to the lecture or tutorial.

[dealbreakerc]

I am generally opposed to attendance tracking at university with exceptions for sessions which require physical attendance (e.g., a laboratory experiment) or where absence of student A would be markedly detrimental to the learning of the other students (e.g., classes that are heavily discussion based). If a student is choosing to spend over nine thousand pounds to study at university and is not taking advantage of one of the primary forms of instruction, then that is largely an individual making a poor decision. In those cases where a student is not attending for some other reason (feeling they need to work or are I'll either physically or mentally) then universities have mechanisms in place for students to seek help that are far more accessible than supports for others in the general population.

I also can't help but question how effective tracking attendance will be (for whatever reason the university is mandating this). I can immediately see flaws with using one-time codes (e.g., one person goes to lecture and copies the code into a group text or message and all the rest just have to be awake and able to copy the code into their app/browser at some point during lecture) and requiring students to allow their phones to track their location has a snowball's chance in hell of standing up to any legal challenge as someone would (for several possible reasons including reasonable and paranoid ones) object to this and obviously runs into issues should a student choose not to have or be unable to have a phone. An alternative system such as one requiring students to scan/swipe their ID card also has problems such as one student swiping in for their friends as well, students forgetting or losing their ID card (even for a short period of time before getting a replacement), or even just physically slowing down the process of students entering or leaving the room which may eat into lecture time (i.e., students slowly filing in makes it difficult to focus on a lecture for both students and the lecturer plus those students still in line to swipe in or getting to a seat aren't in a position to focus and thus aren't benefiting much at all from the lecture).

I know it is easy to identify problems without providing potential solutions, but in this case I see attendance tracking as simply creating far more problems than benefits or solutions to problems.

Edit: and there is also the problem with equating attendance to engagement. An attendance tracking system does nothing to prevent a student from spending all lecture on their laptop or phone doing something else or sleeping or just blankly staring off into space. If the university is attempting to use attendance tracking as a means of boosting student engagement then it is bound to fail for the easy workarounds I mentioned in my main comment and the fact that attendance is not the same thing as engagement with the learning process.

[dr.mohamedmansour]

Great video. I am a university professor too. I love your videos

[annalisavolpone]

Tell us how it went! Have a great semester!

[derranstokes]

What an interesting topic, I would love to see feedback on how it goes.

[Yutappy]

Imagine paying £9, 250 per year to NOT attend lectures...

[profpat]

Tracks the lecturer's attendance too🙂