2009 International Conference on Engineering Education (ICEED 2009), December 7-8, 2009, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Attendance Taking based on Seating Plan Method (SPM)

T.O. Ting

Dept of IT, HKUSpace Global College,

Suzhou, China zhaoen@ieee.org

Abstract-An innovative method of taking attendance in a class

has been proposed in this paper. This method has been implemented with encouraging output in an international college in China. The innovative method is much faster in comparison with the conventional way of attendance taking. Nonetheless, the method is prone to some constraints. Pros and cons of the method are discussed to enable the right application at the right environment.

Keywords- Attendance; Seating plan method; Classroom management

I. BACKGROUND

Attendance taking is an important task, which is a part of a lecturer's responsibilities. As a normal practice in many higher institutions such as universities, students are given more freedom as the universities do not implement a strict rule on their attendance. The reason why attendance taking is not seriously handled in many universities is that universities' students tend to be motivated to come to class and therefore attendance taking is just a waste of precious time. However, this kind of practice cannot be implemented in institutions where the quality of students is fairly poor. From experience, a quarter of students are not motivated to come to class and often skip classes whenever they wish. To overcome this

H.C. Ting

Tunku Abdul Rahman College (T ARC), Computer Science Division,

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. carolynting@hotmail.com

behavioral problem, an efficient attendance taking tool can provide a solution. Accurate and effective attendance taking has a vital role as one of the methods to monitor students' performance in class, as very often students' results correlate with their presence in the classroom. The drawback of conventional attendance taking is that it is time consuming. To counter this drawback, numerous efficient methods have been developed for attendance taking. This includes the application of RFID [ 1], Bluetooth [2], fingerprint [3] and smart card. These methods are not affordable as they can involve high cost. For example, it will be too costly to put a fingerprint device [4] in every classroom. A school management system such as FOCUS has attendance taking as one of the modules [5].

The Seating Plan Method (SPM) proposed here is a low cost and time saving approach. The most important component in this method is the seating plan. This seating plan may vary according to different classrooms. The respective institution can prepare a common seating plan to be used by all lecturers. This seating plan can either be printed or as an electronic copy. For simplicity, we will confine our explanations of this method based on a printed copy of a seating plan. An example of such a seating plan is given in Figure 1.

BTW: there are 2 "figure 2"s, and maybe 3 "figure l"s

Front Desk

I I I I 1 1

2 2

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3 3

4 4

5 5

6 6 -

7 7

8 8

-

9 9

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10 10

11 11 -

12 12 I I

Figure I. An example of seating plan of a classroom.

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2009 International Conference on Engineering Education (ICEED 2009), December 7-8, 2009, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The seating plan shown in Figure I can accommodate 12x8=96 students. For the implementation, in the first class a printout of the empty seat plan is distributed to students and they write their names on the seat where they prefer to sit for the entire semester. Therefore, it is compulsory for students to keep to the seating that they have chosen. It might be possible for a lecturer to arrange the seating; however, students might not be happy about being forced to sit in a specific seat. If class seating is arranged by the lecturer, less noise is heard as students tend not to speak to mere acquaintances. Again, such an arrangement may cause complications, as students may complain that they are being treated like children. For attendance taking, with a glance, a lecturer can locate those who are absent by locating the empty seats. This is a simple yet effective way of taking attendance.

II. CONSTRAINTS

Any new approach must be considered from all angles and this method does have its limitations and potential problems. The stumbling blocks for implementing this method are:

A. Classrooms with Non-flXed tables and chairs.

The first constraint of the method is that the classroom's chairs and tables must be fixed. This method is not encouraged for classrooms where tables and chairs can be moved around easily. The classroom shown in Figure 2 is an environment where the seating plan method might not produce high efficiency when taking attendance. To implement SPM in such a classroom, the movement of furniture, especially the tables should be kept to a minimum.

Figure 2. Non-fixed tables and chairs.

B. Classroom with fIXed tables with benches

Figure 3 shows a lecture theatre with long tables and fixed long benches as seats. In such a case, there is no way to

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identify proper arrangement of seats, making the SPM impossible.

Figure 3. Lecture theatre with fixed long benches

C. Enormous classroom

A very large classroom (Figure 4) is another situation where SPM is not applicable. From experience, the optimum number of seats for this method is around 150 seats. Another drawback of this lecture theatre shown in Figure 4 is that it has a complicated seating structure comprised of semi-circular tables.

Figure 4. Enormous lecture theatre

D. Classroom with fIXed tables but unfIXed chairs

Classrooms without fixed seating are another obstacle to implementing this method. This kind of classroom can be observed in Figure 5. In such a classroom, there is a tendency for the seating arrangement to be more complex and fluid, making it difficult to identify students based on a seating plan.

2009 International Conference on Engineering Education (ICEED 2009), December 7-8, 2009, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Figure 5. Clasroom with fixed tables but moving chairs

III. OUTCOMES OF SPM

From the implementation of SPM, two significant outcomes are achieved; time-saving and providing assistance for better classroom management. The following list explains these outcomes in detail.

i. Time-saving With a class of 200 students, imagine how much time is

needed to call students one by one. The entire process may require 20 minutes for this cohort of students. This indeed is impractical and time-consuming. The current practice of calling students by name from a list is time-consuming and can mean a loss of as much as 20 minutes of class time. In order to speed up, a lecturer may just ignore attendance taking for a large class, or by calling only those students with poor results. However, these methods introduce inaccuracies to the attendance record. With a seating plan in hand, lecturers can just record those who are absent by locating the empty seats. The entire process is much more efficient than the conventional method.

ii. Better classroom management With a seating plan in hand, a lecturer is able to learn

student's names better. For example, should there be a student making noise or talking in a class, the lecturer can quickly and efficiently locate the student on the chart and address them directly by name. One interesting observation about the SPM is that it has been found that students that choose to sit at the front rows obtained better grades compared to those sitting at the back of the class. This observation is nonetheless common in other classes. Students who sit in front tend to be more interested with the subject matter. A lecturer should encourage students to fill up the front rows during the first lesson and not scatter themselves to ease the implementation of the SPM.

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IV. PROBLEMS ARISING

There are some problems that might be encountered from the SPM. Firstly, students might not comprehend the method and thus not cooperate resulting in this method being unsuccessful. Students may argue and grumble about having fixed seats in a classroom for the entire semester. Perhaps the explanation of the advantages stated in section III will overcome this conflict of interests. Also, students should be warned that if they are found to be sitting in a wrong seat, they will be penalized by a loss of attendance credit.. Lecturers should know that situations such as swapping seats, asking an outsider to sit in for them or sitting in an empty seat may happen. As for the Administrative Affairs Office (AAO), it is their responsibility to design seating plan templates for appropriate classrooms so that the SPM can be implemented.

V. FUTURE IMPROVEMENT

As for now, the method has been implemented with a printed copy of the seating plan for each class. In future, the seating plan may be incorporated in a computer based spreadsheet that would accept a "mouse-click" for input to the record. This seating plan can further be integrated into the attendance record system.

VI. CONCLUSION

In conclusion, this paper proposes an efficient method for taking attendance. The proposed SPM can be implemented in other institutions without any problem as the system has been proved to be workable and effective. The SPM saves a lot of time and at the same time assists in effective classroom management.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

The author would like to express his utmost gratitude to Dr. K.C. Wong, K.D. Enge, Peter Swaine and S.S. Tee for their supports and contributions in making this SPM a successful implementation in HKUSpace Global College. Also, special thanks to Lofton H. Alley JR for the English corrections in this paper.

REFERENCES

[1] M.K. Yeop Sabri, M.l.A. Abdul Aziz, M.S.R. Mohd Shah, M.F. Abd Kadir, "Smart Attendance System by suing RFID". Asia-Pacific Conference on Applied Electromagnetics, 2007. APACE 2007, 4-6 Dec. 2007. Pages 1-4.

[2] Bluetooth Attendance Taking System. Available from

http://kenai.com/projects/mbats

[3] Figerprint time attendance. Available from

http://slayo.com/fingerprint-time-attendance-and-door-system.html

[4] Fingerprint devices. Available from

http://time-attendance.bioenabletech.com/

[5] FOCUS-Student Information System. Available from http://focus-sis.org/Attendance