Online Attendance Management System Guide For Colleges

Student attendance monitoring is a basic activity that happens in every class in colleges. Earlier teachers used to monitor attendance through various manual methods like counting heads, calling roll numbers, etc. Now there are specialized and advanced software tools available in the market which automates the attendance management process and help in monitoring and tracking the attendance of students and institute staff members in real-time.

Online Attendance Management System for Colleges let instructor to quickly and accurately record the attendance of the students either subject wise or day wise in a single click. Effortlessly teachers can keep generating a comprehensive report to keep a check on the students who are regular & who are not. Additionally, students can apply for a leave in less than a minute within an app and teachers gets an instant update which helps them in saving a lot of their effort and time.

Significance of Online Attendance Management System in Colleges

All the higher educational institutions will have attendance connected to the grades. The regular attendance of a student ensures that he participates in the classroom activities and assignments and pays enough attention to the academic coaching inside the classroom. If the students pay enough attention in the classroom they can save a lot of time later in their studies and preparation for exams.

It was observed that the attendance pattern of students in institute carries a lot of correlation with their social and financial backgrounds. This signifies the importance of the attendance management system in colleges. As regular attendance helps the students not only in the academic learning process but also in improving their discipline and becoming responsible citizens of society.

How does an Attendance Management System work in Fedena?

1. In Fedena once the students are admitted to proper batches it is required to generate the timetables for each batch. Once the timetable is ready, the administrators can give teachers the privilege of taking attendance.

2. There are various attendance related settings to be configured in an advance setting like the daily or subject-wise attendance. This is configured in the general settings. This is part of the basic settings of the institution.

3. Once the settings are ready and timetables are also generated, the teachers can update attendance from their individual dashboards either from laptops or mobile phones.

4. The attendance updated in Fedena will be sent as notifications to parents’ mobile phones and will be accessible as a report in each student’s profile.

Note: In case of daily-wise attendance, the attendance can be updated without configuring the timetable in advance.

Who can mark a student’s attendance?

The administrator or any other privileged employee with the “student attendance” register privilege can mark the attendance. However, there are also extra conditions to be met while marking student attendance. If the student attendance type is daily, only the employees assigned as the tutor of a batch can mark the attendance. If the student attendance type is subject-wise, only the employees assigned to the specific subject can mark attendance for the subject.

Ways Attendance can be marked in Fedena

The student attendance module in Fedena is designed to make the attendance tracking as easy as possible.

All the students in the class are considered as “present” by default. So the teacher has to mark only the students who are “absent”. This saves time for teachers. Teachers do this directly from the classroom using the mobile app or can note the absent students in a notebook or attendance register and then later update daily or weekly once from their laptop.

Attendance can be marked as “half-day” or “full-day” according to the preference of the institutions. In the case of higher education institutions, it is usually “subject-wise”. Teachers can also provide a reason for the student’s absence.

This will be helpful while informing the parent about the absence of the students and also for future auditing.

There is an optional rapid attendance mode available in Fedena which allows the teachers to mark attendance without giving the reason for student’s absence.

The SMS notification feature available in Fedena notifies the parents of the students immediately when the teacher marks a student as absent. This helps in improving the transparency, security, and discipline of the institution.

Also, detailed attendance reports can be generated for each batch for detailed analysis by the teacher or higher authorities. Students and parents can view their individual attendance details from their dashboard. Daily-wise attendance does not require the institution to configure timetable in advance as the attendance is marked against each student. But subject-wise attendance will work only if the timetables are properly configured.

Benefits of digitizing the Attendance Management Process

1. Speed – The digitized system allows marking attendance instantly from a mobile phone or laptop. The data updated from the teacher’s laptop or mobile phone will be instantly available across all relevant users in the system.
2. Accuracy – The data updated and maintained through a digitized attendance management system will have fewer errors and it improves the accuracy of the entire system. The reason for fewer errors is due to the decreased paperwork and instant feedback from parents and students in case any error occurred while marking the attendance.
3. Punctuality – The digitized attendance system with its instant availability of reports to higher management, parents, and guardians makes sure that the students attend class properly and this improves the punctuality and discipline of the institution.
4. Instant alerts – This would have been impossible without a digitized system. The SMS alerts, as well as push notifications, can be sent to mobile phones of parents and guardians while using a digitized attendance management system.
5. Instant reports – Because of the digital nature of the data being stored and retrieved the attendance reports can be generated instantly by the administrators of the system. In earlier times it would have taken hours if not days for teachers to prepare and share the attendance reports to principal or HOD.
6. Saves time – As a result of all the above benefits, the system saves the precious time of teachers, which can be now spent wisely on improving academics.
7. Saves paper & storage – With all reports and tools available in digital form, there is no need to print the attendance registers and make copies of the reports to be stored at different offices. This saves paper wastage and requires less storage space.
8. Integrations – The digital nature of the system allows seamless integration with other tools and hardware like biometric, RFID, etc. This inter-connectivity between tools opens up numerous possibilities in academic and administrative improvements. 

About Employees Attendance Management in Fedena

Employee attendance can also be managed and tracked within Fedena. This is achieved through the leave management system available in the HR(human resources) module of Fedena.

Employee attendance is calculated by counting the leaves taken by employees taken by employees for a period of time. For this, the leave management system of Fedena takes care of the leave request and leave approval or deny process within different departments. Employee attendance is independent of the holidays marked in the school calendar. The employees must apply for leave in the system if they are taking leave for a working day. In case an employee does not apply for leave, the administrator can mark leave in the system using admin privileges. This usually happens when the employee has exhausted the allotted leaves and is in the requirement of additional leaves. 

The employee attendance report displays the leave details of all employees in a particular department. This is accessible in the HR module under employee leave management as an attendance report.

Automating the Attendance via Biometric or RFID System Integration in Fedena

The attendance management system can be further automated by implementing biometric and RFID systems within the campus & integrating the hardware with the attendance management system. This improvement can take the remaining workload also from teachers and make attendance management fully automatic.

Such a complete transformation might be costly and not practical for small institutions. So they go for a hybrid approach. Instead of implementing hardware inside of each classroom, they install hardware at different key locations on the campus like the main gate, canteen, library, etc. So instead of tracking the subject-wise or class-wise attendance, these hardware track the overall attendance of the student in and out of the institution campus. 

The devices can be also kept in school buses to improve the safety and security of school operations outside the campus. So it works as an attendance tracking system for transportation vehicles. The alerts are sent instantly to the parents when students get in or get out of the bus. These devices can also work as an efficient tool to mark and track movements within the restricted areas of the campus for students.

Conclusion

With the digital transformation trend going on in all sectors across the globe, no schools or colleges can survive this digital age without proper digital attendance management systems and attendance tracking devices like biometric and RFID. These systems ensure the discipline of the institution is maintained and the academics strive towards excellence. The system also provide peace of mind to parents through instant notifications about the students’ attendance behavior.

If you are looking for a system to digitally transform your school or college, contact the Fedena sales team today.