While taking attendance can be tedious and inefficient, it’s one of the most important actions during class each day because it gives schools a way to gain insight into student exposure to learning material.
For career schools especially, where students earn career-specific credentials, tracking attendance accurately is important for many reasons, including:
- Calculating the last day of attendance (LDA) and return to Title IV
- Administering equitable make-up work
- Staying in compliance when audits come around
- Protection in lawsuits, like “borrower’s defense” cases
- Tracking students’ satisfactory academic progress (SAP)
- Monitoring skill development and career readiness
But traditional methods of taking attendance are susceptible to fraud and academic dishonesty and can cause complications for schools. To make taking attendance simple and accurate, CourseKey has recently released its market-first Face/Fingerprint scan attendance solution.
How It Works
CourseKey’s Face/Fingerprint Scan provides an easy and secure method for students to check in and out of class, whether online or in person, by leveraging the stored biometric security data on students’ devices. The biometric data includes facial recognition and fingerprint identification, which allows smartphone users to unlock their phone by scanning their face or fingerprint. This same technology is used by world-class banks and password management systems for secure user verification. CourseKey’s solution works the same way, but instead of unlocking a phone or accessing a bank account, it allows students to check in and out of class.
Providing Secure Online Attendance
Now that thousands of schools across the country have moved to emergency online education in response to the pandemic, and will most likely continue with online education for the foreseeable future, the opportunity for fraud in online courses is at an all-time high. Organizations that leverage online courses or trainings need to know that the students who are receiving credit for attendance are actually present.
CoursKey’s Face/Fingerprint Scan attendance solution can guard against user fraud by verifying that the person behind the screen is indeed their student. In addition, CourseKey’s client schools get the added protection of arming instructors with real-time roster updates to validate who they see on screen with who should and should not be in their class at any given moment.
On Ground User Verification
Traditional on ground attendance methods like pen and paper sign-in sheets, clickers, verbal roll call, and others have their limitations. Classes that opt for those methods are very susceptible to academic dishonesty. But CourseKey’s Face/Fingerprint scan is ideal for conducting attendance in on ground classes, too.
In traditional college classes, for example, which sometimes have hundreds of students in class at once, the Face/Fingerprint scan allows professors to know that their enrolled student is the one in attendance and not a friend of theirs checking them in.
Apart from being a secure attendance solution, the Face/Fingerprint scan is also very efficient because it allows students to check in simultaneously, sparing valuable minutes of class time typically spent conducting attendance.
Externships
Between collecting time sheets, back and forth communication with site supervisors, and inefficient processes, conducting attendance in externships can be a headache. But factor in the challenge of user verification, and externship attendance becomes problematic.
Staff at the externship site don’t always know what students visiting the site look like, making it hard to verify student identity. It can become challenging for site staff when many different students are completing hours each day and while staff are focused on other responsibilities they have at the site. And because students are currently having to wear personal protective equipment at externship sites due to the COVID-19 pandemic, verifying student identity can be even more difficult.
But with the Face/Fingerprint scan verifying student identity, school and site staff can be confident that the students completing hours are who they say they are, and not someone else filling in for them.
In Conclusion
Whether you’re conducting classes online or in person, having a secure user identification solution will help you drastically minimize fraud and academic dishonesty during attendance. By leveraging CourseKey’s Face/Fingerprint Scan solution, you can know instantly who is in attendance and be confident that your teaching material is reaching the students enrolled in your program.
CourseKey’s Face/Print Scan is available now on iOS and Android devices that support face and/or fingerprint scanning. To see the solution in action, request a personalized demo at the link below.
