Students Attendance System Based On Mobile Location

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

This chapter includes a brief background of previous researches about attendance and attendance systems. Monitoring students’ attendance always has an important role in educational environments. Many researches have shown that students’ attendance has a strong relationship to their CGPA.

Nowadays there are many attendance systems such as RFID and fingerprint base systems in the market, but many schools and universities still are using the very old method of keeping attendance which is passing a paper to students and ask them to sign it. Using this method in a class will waste lecturer and students’ time.

Issues of available attendance systems will review in this chapter and the reasons that we need to design another attendance system for educational environments will explained. This chapter also covers statement of the problem, research aim and objectives, research design, significant of the study, terminology and the organization of the thesis.

1.1 Background of study

This section provides an overview of the role of attendance in educational environments, different attendance systems and their issues.

1.1.1 Attendance in educational environments

There are different factors that can help predicting the success of a student in an educational environment and attendance is one of the main elements (Broucek & Bass, 2011). Golding (2011) mentioned some attendance policies that can be used by lecturers to take attendance such as: signing a paper, random in class writing assignments and weekly quizzes.

When students attend the class, they can obtain more information which is presented by lecturer in the classroom and not included in their textbooks thus it will influence their grades (Credé, Roch, & Kieszczynka, 2010).

There is a debate between researchers for a long time about the effect of having an attendance policy on the students’ results. Some researchers indicated that the class attendance has a strong positive relation to students results (Credé et al., 2010) whereas other researches mentioned that the relation between class attendance and academic performance is ambiguous (Golding, 2011) but this is clear that having any kind of attendance policy will guarantee the presence of students in the class (Golding, 2011).

1.1.2 Attendance systems

The very old and classic method of keeping attendance in an educational environment is that lecturer passes a paper to students and asks them to sign it. After personal computers revolution and also using them in the education, many researchers started to solve attendance problem using computers.

Student response systems or clickers was one of the first technologies which used to take attendance in early 1960s (Judson & Sawada, 2002). Clickers are simply a live polling system for classrooms (Lowery, 2005) but they also used for collecting attendance data (Fies & Marshall, 2006). Each clicker system includes three elements which are: a software to design multiple questions or polls and analyze the answers that should be installed on class computer, a clicker or response unit to send the selected answer to the software to analyze and a receiver which also connected to the computer to receive the answers (Kaleta & Joosten, 2007).

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is another technology which is used for many purposes including attendance systems. RFID attendance system also has three parts which are: a RFID tag that has some information, a reader to read the tag information and a software installed on a computer as host to analyze the data (Silva, Filipe, & Pereira, 2008). The tag can attach to objects or inside objects, the reader reads tag’s information within its wireless range (Chawla & Dong Sam, 2007) and sent to the software.

Fingerprint is one of the biometric systems which is used to recognize a person based on his fingerprint. Each persons’ fingerprint is unique, (Nawaz, Pervaiz, Korrani, & Azhar-ud-din., 2009) stable, permanence and easy to take (Zhang & Ji, 2006). A fingerprint system needs a sensor to capture student finger print and also a software which match the fingerprint with the database and show the result on a screen (Nawaz et al., 2009). One of the positive points of this system is that students cannot cheat.

There are other attendance systems that researchers tried different methods as experimental and those cannot found on the market, please see Chapter 2, Section 2.3 for more description of such systems.

1.1.3 Issues of current attendance systems

Old method of taking attendance is time consuming specially in a class with many students (Kizildag, Basar, Celikag, Atasoylu, & Mousavi, 2007; Nawaz, Assad, & Khalil, 2010; Nawaz et al., 2009). Also after signing the paper, calculating the percentage of attendance for each student. Cheating in this system is very easy, students can sign on behalf of their friends.

In order to implement clicker system, the organization should buy a system for each class and also it should order a response unit for each student in the class. This can be done in a small educational environment but for a university with many students, it needs a big budget.

For using the fingerprint system, we have the same problem to provide fingerprint sensor for each classroom and also connect all of the sensors to the server is another problem that requires a big budget also.

In order to implement RFID attendance system in addition to the problems that mentioned above, there is a concern about privacy and security. Because RFID tags can recognize by the reader wirelessly and automatically, there is a concern that if in each classroom there is a reader, it can determine the location of students whereas student does not want to trace by the system.

1.2 Statement of the problem

The above background of research and issues of an attendance system in an educational environment, finalized tow research problem statement:

Implementing each of mentioned available attendance systems needs a big budget and time to installing new systems. Although there are wireless clickers, readers and fingerprint sensors on the market now, but the price of wireless devices is higher than wire devices.

As mentioned in issues section, there is a concern about privacy for students specially by using RFID attendance system.

In this research, a new attendance system based on student’s mobile indoor location (MMULBAS) proposed as one of the solutions to solve mentioned problems. This system has two parts which are: a mobile application that students install it on their mobile phones and save their attendance, and a web based application for administrator to manage the whole system, lecturers to see their classes’ attendance report and students to check their attendance history.

1.3 Research aim and objectives

The main goal of this research is to answer this question: "What is the Multimedia University students’ experience of working with MMU location based attendance system?"

In order to answer that question of this research project, the objectives are stated as:

To design and develop new attendance system based on mobile indoor location.

To understand the experience of MMU students working with MMULBAS.

1.4 Research design and scope

To achieve the main aim of this research, a new attendance system has been designed and developed as a prototype. The new system requires to be used in an environment that has Wi-Fi access to the internet. Although MMU Cyberjaya is a Wi-Fi campus but there are a few classes which have Wi-Fi coverage thus researcher chose research methodology class because it was conducted at K-space faculty of creative multimedia which has a good Wi-Fi coverage.Another requirement for this project was an Android phone and that means just students who have an android phone could participate in this research.

After working with the system for 3 weeks, researcher used a semi-structured interview (Kajornboon, 2005) to get the students’ experience. Researcher used an interview guide (Appendix 3) and all conversations recorded.

1.5 Significant of the study

Indoor positioning via mobile phone is a new technology in the market and until now there is no attendance system that uses indoor location of students via their hand phones.

One of the advantages of this system is its cost for organizations. This system does not need to install new devices in environment when Wi-Fi internet implemented in the organization. Organizations just need to buy the software and give the students the mobile application to install.

By implementing this system, lecturers will not to be worry about the attendance and it will be the students who are responsible for their attendance. All calculations will do automatically. Also the time of lecturers and student in class will saved by using this system.

1.6 Limitations

In order to MMULBAS works, it needs to be used in a place which has Wi-Fi coverage with at least three access points and also the mobile client application for this project developed on Android platform. Thus the limitations of this research project stated as:

Limitation of choosing a classroom which has a complete Wi-Fi coverage at MMU Cyberjaya.

Limitation of choosing participant because for now, the system works on Android phones only.

1.7 Organization of thesis

This thesis includes five chapters. Chapter one provides a brief of research background and also explains the statement of the problem, research aim and objectives, research design and significant of the study. Chapter two contains literature reviews on attendance and different attendance systems. Chapter three describes the design and development of the attendance system and also includes the interview as the methodology of this research. Chapter four reports the results of interviews and technical findings about attendance system. Chapter five presents the overall discussion and recommendations on findings of this research.

1.8 Summary

This chapter explains about importance of attendance in academic environment and also presents a brief description of available attendance systems on the market and their issues. This chapter also described the research design and scope and the limitation of this study.

CHAPTER 2:

LITERATURE REVIEW

2.0 Introduction

2.1 The role of attendance in academic environment

2.2 Learning management system

2.3 Attendance systems

2.3.1 Fingerprint

2.3.2 RFID

2.3.3 Clickers

2.4 Indoor positioning system

2.5 Summary

CHAPTER 3:

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

3.0 Introduction

3.1 Design of study

3.2 Participants

3.3 Setting of the study

3.4 Data collection

3.5 Data analysis

3.6 Development

3.7 Summary

CHAPTER 4:

RESULTS AND FINDINGS

4.0 Introduction

4.1 Interview results

4.2 Technical findings

4.3 Summary

CHAPTER 5:

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

5.0 Introduction

5.1 Summary of the study

5.2 Discussion

5.3 Recommendation for future research

5.4 Summary

APPENDICES

Appendix 1: Consent form

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Appendix 2: Installation guide

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Appendix 3: Interview guide

MMULBAS Interview Guide

Student’ experience about working with other attendance systems

Student’ experience of this study

What student thinks about the amount of time needed to work with this system?

What student thinks about the reliability of the system?

What student thinks about the functionality of the system?

What student thinks about the UI of mobile app and website?

What is the student’ idea if this system implement at MMU?

What features they need to have in this system?

Appendix 4: Paper presented at Mobilcase 2012

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Appendix 5: Poster participated at MMU Innovation day

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