Attendance management: Make every virtual learning moment count

The unprecedented outbreak of COVID-19 has wreaked havoc in the schools across the world with their sudden closure. Due to everyone stuck at their homes, the methods of teaching, assessment, administration and management operations have been predominantly affected. It has served as a massive wake up call for the authorities. They have been reminded that the Indian Education system needs a rigorous transformation.

According to UNESCO, one of the most prominent organisations in the world working towards strengthening the education sector, the shutdown due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected more than 1.5 billion students and 63 million teachers across 188 countries. This exacerbating crisis called for critical solutions. The world has witnessed a radical shift from traditional offline teaching methods to digital online remote learning. The schools are leveraging new-age technology to provide a conducive environment for remote learning for students.

With everything being virtual, everyday work processes of schools also need to be managed virtually. This is possible through integrated cloud-based solutions provided by various Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) providers and student management systems in the market. Earlier, academic and non-academic operations at schools used to be managed offline with the help of workforce. Now, all this needs to be managed online while ensuring transparency across departments. This is not a cakewalk.

Although this has been made easy by the features that the sound student management systems provide. Their solutions support digital transformation and harbour immersive learning experience. Can you imagine that their solutions have even replaced the age-old roll call attendance system with an automatic attendance management for schools?

These student management systems have an in-built feature that provides real-time attendance monitoring. Since they have automated the attendance management systems in schools, it becomes relatively easy to get the best out of the students. Most of the attendance management systems have the following features:

• Self-Attendance System: The system automatically gets notified and registers the attendance of a student as soon as he/she logs into the platform. There is no need for the teacher taking a virtual roll call. This is why it is called a self-attendance system.

• Auto-Generated Reports: The system enables the formulation of a variety of reports which will give you all the data showing a detailed view of leaves, absents, early and the late ins and outs, and holidays.

• Comparative analysis: It makes the assessment of teaching-learning goals easier. The teachers can keep a tab of the students absent from the class and then compare their results with those who regularly attend the classes.

• Automated notifications to parents: In the case of chronic absenteeism, the teachers can notify the parents to help them understand the importance of virtual classes.

Therefore, the teachers can quickly and efficiently manage their students remotely while working from home in this time of crisis. The attendance management module lets the users create an attendance table by providing the details like the class division and the date for which the attendance needs to be taken. When the teachers click on it, they get the list of all the students belonging to that division. Therefore, the teachers can generate attendance reports and filter them by subject-wise, class-wise, division-wise, etc.

Attendance taking - one of the toughest paint points of online learning, has been solved by the Attendance Management Systems provided by the student management systems. After all, what would be the point in implementing these systems if the students don’t attend classes regularly? So, whether it is about managing a school offline or online, as a faculty and a teacher, you should also focus on student attendance.