Every educational institution has now adopted digital means for carrying out everyday activities in the school. Whether it is a school ERP, or university management, using digital devices is proving to be very convenient for everyone.
An attendance management system is one such advancement that schools are making. With its various advantages, such as log-in convenience and error-free data registering, people can face challenges while using it. Since this system is designed to register the attendance of students as well as employees (teaching and nonteaching staff), maintaining it could be an issue.
Let’s have a look at the various challenges of using an attendance management system and ways of fixing them;
- Lack of planning
Students and teachers are well aware that an attendance management system does not make mistakes, and does not grant an extra attendance on request. The point of having an attendance management system is not only to relieve a teacher of some commitments which can be replaced by priority-based tasks but also to maintain accuracy. Thus students and teaching, as well as non-teaching staff, will calculate the number of days that they can miss, productively.
However, without proper planning, an attendance management system might turn out to be overburdening for students and they might end up feeling that the system is unfair. This is because some projects and activities hinder students from participating in classes, which causes them to miss the classes. With a log or register, it would have been possible to give in their attendance since they were busy in school activities and deserve that attendance.
To overcome this challenge, before investing in an attendance management system, the school ERP should plan the features. It could be done by consulting a few teachers and allowing them to weigh in on how the features could be designed so that changes can be made easily without interfering with the normal processes of the system.
- Policies and their applicability
The majority of these attendance systems lack a policy. Even if there are policies or few guidelines, only teachers are made aware of them. complete knowledge of information allows students to trust their school management. Yet precautions should be taken by the institution to ensure that students don’t know more than what is required. This is because some might find loopholes in the system and misuse them.
- Poor tracking
An attendance management system can stop tracking student attendance after a few months if the data has been saved improperly, there are glitches in the system, or if or teacher fails to save or register the attendance taken for the day. To avoid such problems, teachers should check before the class begins, and recheck after the class is over to assure that they are adhering to the policies.
- Administration
An institution is aware of the role that an attendance management system plays. Despite this, the administration fails to do its task either because of overworking or because they have been slacking off. Both of these are equally opposite problems, for the first case extra employees should be hired to administer the system, and to avoid the administrative staff from slacking off the manager or supervisors should ask for recording metrics or data at the end of every week. The thought of having to turn in work will make them do it.
- Inconsistency in calculating absentees
The main task of an attendance system is to record the number of students and employees who were present and mark the ones who are absent. For some reason, the system could go down and mark them absent in an inconsistent pattern. By doing this, the total number of days that a child or employee was absent remains the same but the dates might change. improper recording of data can prove to be a problem in the future in case this data is used. To avoid this, teachers should cross-check the absentees in an attendance management system by observing the class themselves. Cross-checking it will take only 5 minutes, and eliminates a lot of other future problems.
- Medical verifications
People on sick leave or any other leave need to turn in proper reasoning with proof. Especially when an employee or a child is severely sick, and needs regular off from classes. For this, an attendance management system must be able to verify prescriptions and other submitted reports.