Student Attendance Monitoring

There are two basic stakeholder viewpoints regarding student attendance monitoring at scheduled teaching sessions in modern Higher Education. These are that:

1. Modern HE students are mature and capable of making their own decisions about how to engage with their learning and their learning resources. The degree of flexibility and choice has been advanced considerably by the continued developments in institutional and personal technologies, and the primacy of the face-to-face taught session has been reduced as a result. The responsibilities that come with choice are seen to develop important personal core skills for the student. The consequence is that, from a learning point of view, the monitoring of student progress against learning goals has become more important than the monitoring of attendance at scheduled classes;
2. There is a requirement for HE institutions to monitor and report on student attendance to funding bodies and, for overseas students, to the UK Border Agency. Attendance monitoring is also a valuable component of the student support system that triggers action when lack of attendance indicates a problem. Attendance monitoring, particularly relating to whether a student has withdrawn from the course, is important as the information is used by the SLC to trigger the release of student loans and student fees. The consequence is that, from a management point of view,  there is a requirement for institutions to report on the attendance status of students and this is currently achieved by monitoring attendance at scheduled classes.

It is clear that student attendance monitoring for legal and financial accountability purposes is essential. However, the changes in teaching and learning practice, driven by the continuing emergence of new supportive technologies, are making face-to-face attendance monitoring increasingly inappropriate as the sole measure of learning engagement.
In practice, of course, individual tutors are monitoring their cohorts and are taking appropriate local action. Good practice in this regard needs to be systematised and included as a component of the monitoring and reporting process.

Second Phase of Stakeholder Interviews

The second phase of stakeholder interviews is well under way, having begun at the beginning of April. This phase is concentrating on the student information management responsibilities of academic staff and the use of the student information management system by the students themselves.

A minimum of twelve members of staff will be interviewed, three from each of the four Faculties, and currently this is 50% complete (the Easter break causing a bit of a delay this month). Already, however, some interesting new messages are emerging.

The first of these is about the more diverse information management tools used by academic staff compared with registry and management staff. Quite understandably, the academic staff are using the institutional VLE, Moodle, to communicate with students and to guide their academic progress. The Agresso system is used to report on their achievements, but is not used to support academic delivery. This emphasises the fact that the system is an institutional management tool, not an academic delivery support tool.

A second message is that staff engage with the information management process in different ways and with different degrees of commitment. It is self evident that the effectiveness of any information management system is entirely dependent on the quality of the information it receives. There are three different staff attitudes emerging that impact on the quality of information input to the system:

1. Staff that recognise that student information management is an essential component of the student support system, as well as being required for effective institutional management;
2. Staff who regard student information management as an administrative task that should not be the responsibility of academics whose primary role is to teach;
3. Staff who largely comply with the student information management requirements but have no confidence in the value it delivers.

These are important messages that need to be considered along with the system usability improvements already reported. It is clear that the recommendations from this project will not only relate to informations systems design, but also to professional development activity that ensures consistency of information management across the institution.