Attendance Monitoring Report for Senior Management

The attendance monitoring, actioning and reporting mini-project within Smudie was completed and the outcomes discussed with the Vice Chancellor. This led to a request to present the findings to the University Senior Management team for discussion and decisions regarding future planning and actions. The presentation prepared for that purpose is shown below:

Smdd presentation from Tony Toole

Information Management Review Meeting

A review of the information management system was held at the university on 13 July with a view to (1) updating all key stakeholders on developments and (2) planning for the next phase of development. Dave Smith, systems programmer, summarised all the developments and upgrades to the student records system and Chris Godsmark, MIS manager, reported on the external facing information communications, particularly the HESA returns. Tony Toole provided an update on the progress of the Smudie project and reported that the extensive stakeholder consultation phase of the project had been completed. He was in the process of documenting the outcomes and this would include a full 'as is' Enterprise Architecture model of the student information management system. Other diagramming outcomes of the process included a revised systems schematic which illustrated the range of external systems links (left hand side) and the internal information streams (right hand side).

Student and Institutional Information Management Systems

Below the top-level recording processes are the actions that the records trigger. These in themselves add to the information in the student records system and contribute metadata.

 

The map above shows the monitoring of both student academic attainment and attendance. The key feature of both is the combined outcome of Remedial Action. Discussions with all academic staff as part of the Smudie project had one very consistent feature: that all staff were focussed on student success and the support of them in their journey towards it.
Drilling down further takes the process towards the initiation of more formal University procedures:

Here the student record system is providing information that leads to follow-on action that both provides additional support for the students and provides essential data for the institutional management information system. It emphasises that the student information management system is only a sub-set (albeit a central one) to the overall institutional system.

An Enterprise Architecture Model of Attendance Monitoring

Enterprise Architecture modelling is being used by the JISC Smudie project to create process maps of student information management systems at SMU. These maps enable the system stakeholders to engage in informed conversations about the effectiveness of existing systems and to plan for improvements.
Often these maps present a picture of flexible and adaptable systems that recognise the different needs and contexts of the curriculum areas. This is no more apparent than in the top level systems map that emerged for student attendance monitoring.



It's a straightforward process involving the recording and reporting on students' engagement with their learning. However, this occurs in different ways ranging from formally and consistently timetabled lectures and practical classes to variable and negotiable sessions involving a high degree of student choice.
The University presently allows the curriculum areas to devise and manage their own attendance monitoring arrangements. The variation is illustrated in the systems map where the square white boxes are OR functions indicating choice. It can be seen that either the students or the tutor complete registers, that these registers are predominantly paper based (but not always), that the tutor transcribes these onto a spreadsheet (but not always) and that these are on common folders on the intranet (but not always).
The question that emerges from the analysis is whether the University is optimally served by this flexibility and can adequately meet its external reporting requirements. It is exactly this kind of question that the EA modelling is designed to invite.

Attendance monitoring spawns a mini-project

The previous post on attendance monitoring emphasised the need for a more consistent and time efficient way of gathering accurate data at the University. A technology based solution using student proximity cards has been trialled this term and the outcomes are to be discussed at a meeting on Friday.
However, it is not just data gathering that is a problem, it is also in the way that information is interpreted and made available to the various outside agencies who use it. The four main agencies are the Higher Education Funding Council, the Student Loan Company, HESA and the UK Border Agency.
The University is anxious to ensure the completeness and accuracy of student attendance data and the way it is interpreted and presented so that it can be confident that it is in compliance with legal and financial requirements. It is also keen that information in the public domain presents an appropriate picture of institutional performance.
For this reason, a mini-project has been launched to re-visit the information requirements of the agencies, not the least because they change their reporting requirements and arrangements from time to time, and to make appropriate changes to the University reporting procedures to achieve these outcomes.

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.