Abstract:

Nowadays, in some Spanish universities, it is usual that classroom attendance forms part of student evaluation in order to increase the number of students who come to theoretical sessions. Presence and participation could be found as part of student assessment in most of the subjects, so it is needed a reliable and fast method to control attendance to avoid mistakes or delays in classes. Although the percentage in student marks of that item it is usually low (around 5% to 10%), it has proven its benefits in student attendance. Before the attendance control, in some theoretical classes, it was infrequent to count more than the 50% of enrolled students. After the establishment of the attendance control, some subjects have experimented and attendance growth of more than 35%. Moreover, the number of theoretical classes with more than 50% of attendance reaches 70% of total sessions. Thus, it is important that those kinds of new controls will be seamless, even when the number of students was high, in order to avoid unnecessary waste of time in class start up. Therefore, it is presented a new mobile application based on Near Field Communication (NFC) to help the teacher in controlling student attendance to classes. The mobile application is designed to employ the new features that NFC offers and the Ilias Learning Management System through their web services interface, writing automatically a record in the teacher workspace for every student that came to the class. The new developed application has proven its usefulness when a NFC-able device is used, students only have to pre-enter their credentials and put their mobile phones close to a NFC tag when they enter and to another NFC tag when they exit. The developed application is in an initial full-functioning prototype, but, apart from security measures, it can register a student in phew seconds. In future versions of the application, new functionality will be available, like register with personal NFC cards, teacher side application or personal identification cards, like the Spanish digital national identification document.

Keywords:

Attendance assessment, LMS, NFC, mobile application.