Leveraging student dashboards with real-time attendance data can stop attrition in its tracks.
When it comes to stopping attrition, every hour that passes without intervening with at-risk students lowers your chances of keeping them from dropping out. With manual attendance tracking processes, information about which students are missing takes valuable time to reach the registrars, and depending on a school’s policies, can even take several days. Manually entering attendance data into systems is a tedious, time consuming task. And for instructors who have multiple classes, taking the time to manually upload data can be a nuisance that they decide to put off until the end of the day or even the next morning.
In this process, the people who are ultimately responsible for the attendance data are the registrars, because it’s their job to reach out to absent students. Imagine if schools could take the responsibility of manually entering attendance data out of the instructors’ hands and make the data accessible to registrars immediately without waiting for class to finish. That would significantly speed up the process of identifying and intervening with at-risk students and drastically increase the chance of keeping them enrolled.
Expediting The Process
This is where the power of visual attendance dashboards comes in. By replacing pen and paper attendance tracking and using a digital solution instead, schools can collect attendance data and analyze it all in one place. In the case of CourseKey’s attendance solutions, students check in to class using their mobile devices. As soon as the students tap the check-in button, the technology verifies that the student is in the correct location at the correct time, and the data is automatically uploaded and presented to registrars in real-time through visual dashboards. The registrars can see each active class, their respective attendance rates, and which students – if any – are absent.
Total Oversight
If an institution has multiple campuses with institution-wide registrars monitoring them collectively, dashboards enable the ability to see each active class across every campus of the school. This capability gives authorized personnel complete oversight of every student enrolled in the entire organization.
Monitor Student / Instructor Ratios
In addition to understanding which students are absent, dashboards show registrars exactly how many students are enrolled in each course. This is especially useful for labs and clinicals, which in many cases have federal or accreditor regulations dictating how many students an instructor can be responsible for at a given time. Administrators can see the number of students enrolled and instructors assigned to each class and use that information to ensure they’re in compliance.
Stop Attrition With The Big Picture
To illustrate the power of dashboards, consider this analogy. Take a mural painted on the side of a building. Imagine you were walking on the sidewalk right next to the mural. If you turned and faced it, chances are you would be too close to the mural to know exactly what it was a painting of. But if you walked across the street (using a crosswalk, of course) and faced the mural from the opposing sidewalk, you would see in an instant how all of the components come together to form one cohesive picture. 
Taking a step back and examining subject matter from a distance is sometimes the step needed to understand exactly what is going on. Just like how murals are often comprised of smaller components, dashboards allow registrars to see the big picture made up of smaller reports. They’re a way for registrars to “step back” and examine their student body as a whole. By doing so, registrars can derive insights about certain programs, clinicals, individual students, each respective campus, etc.
Having instant access to higher quality data is the first step to better decision-making. To learn how to stop attrition in its tracks through real-time attendance data, schedule a demo with a CK team member below!
