Attendance Management In Educational Institutions
Attendance, which is coined from the verb to attend means to be present at an event or occasion at a particular time that is allocated to such event. Attendance management is therefore the act of managing attendance in an institution. Attendance management becomes important when it is used to keep track of people’s presence and attitude towards events or occasions in particular environments or institutions. An example of such environment is a school or a workplace.
A school is an organization to make learning spaces and learning environments available for sharing knowledge and experience for students with the supervision of teachers. Many schools have advanced, such that we have situations whereby students are being taught both in and out of classrooms. The students are educated on the curriculum of the course or skill which they have chosen to study after which they can acquire more knowledge on their own. They can do that via the internet, or by meeting an expert in their fields of study for more information.
Nowadays, especially in schools, many students attend lectures and or other events unwillingly and some students do not attend at all, making it the duty of the lecturers or other officers to oversee the attendance records of students for each lecture or event. This exercise has been carried out by various methods in the past but these methods have been inaccurate in one way or the other. There is the use of hardcopy spreadsheets where the lecturer ticks ‘present’ or ‘absent’ against a student’s name after confirming the student is present or absent for the lecture for that day and, or the lecturer passes the hardcopy spreadsheet once he or she gets to the lecture hall for each student to sign against their names.
The use of hardcopy spreadsheets obviously has a lot of flaws connected with it, one of which is that it is time-consuming. During this process, one student can choose to sign for his or her friend which is not even physically present at that time. Presently, many schools have started to use computers to record and store their attendance records. The hardcopy spreadsheets are still being used but they are later transferred to a softcopy spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel. This method is only better because it saves space and very simple operations (such as getting students with attendance lower than a particular percentage) can be performed. This method is still restricted because one or more students can still sign for their friends that are absent.
