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Lecturers receive bar-code scanners to take register
1 October 2009
Staff complain of being given time-consuming 'housekeeping' duties. Melanie Newman reports
A lecturer has accused the University of Derby of turning academics into administrators by asking them to check in students with hand-held scanners to monitor attendance.
Academics say that scanning bar codes on students' ID cards, uploading the data and reporting absences will take at least ten minutes each lecture.
"Lecturers' time - which ought to be available for preparation and scholarly activity - will be taken to upload the data, check that it's correct and follow up on any areas of doubt, then notify the attendance-monitoring unit of absentees," one lecturer said.
"After a stretch of different one-hour lectures, all these data have to be sorted into the relevant repositories."
He said it was another example of academics being overloaded with "housekeeping" duties.
"Each increment, we are told, is nothing at all, really, just a few minutes. But, overall, we struggle to find the time and energy to devote to academia - we're actually all administrators now."
An internal memo tells Derby staff: "In order to meet with university policy on attendance monitoring of students, a roll-out of electronic bar-code scanners is being undertaken for all academic staff ... All students at all lectures must be scanned and the data uploaded. In addition, student absences must be reported via the report function within the scanner software."
June Hughes, the university's registrar and director of student support and information services, said the scheme demonstrated Derby's "concern for student support, maintaining contact and maximising achievement potential".
She continued: "This scanning technology is quick and easy to use, training is provided and many staff are complimentary about the process."
Students have been told that they must carry ID cards at all times.
The disgruntled lecturer, who asked not to be named, suggested that the system was too inflexible.
"We've been told that if a student has no card, we can mark them absent - in spite of visible proof to the contrary," he said.
"The scanners are hand-held. Either lecturers hang on to it, to guard against fiddling or forgetting, or they pass it round. In the former case, no teaching is carried out; in the latter, no cast-iron information is generated."
It is not the first time a university has monitored attendance electronically. In 2006, the University and College Union described an electronic-monitoring system adopted by a number of universities, including Glamorgan and Napier, as "like some kind of Orwellian nightmare".
However, all universities are now required to keep tabs on overseas students under the points-based immigration system. They must report to the immigration authorities students who persistently fail to attend classes.
Sue Morrison, senior assistant registrar for student experience at Derby, said there was growing interest in the sector about systems to help them do this efficiently.
"We have hosted visits from a number of other universities who have expressed interest in seeing this initiative and how it works," she said.
melanie.newman@tsleducation.com.
Readers' comments
How do the students feel about it? - and is this initiative intended to satisfy a specific law? - or are the students actually allowed to abstain?
Wouldn't need all this nonsense if we were just allowed to electronically tag 'em
Hang on - so about 100 minutes pw to scan and the same again to sort out the data? - 200 minutes per lecturer per week - what's that cost over 25 weeks? multiplied by all the lecturers... who is paying for it?
Having used the scanners all week, students seem quite happy to have their cards scanned. In fact they`ve reminded me to do them on at least one occasion. The process takes a minute, up-loading takes a few seconds and once the initial settings are done it`s almost all automatic. Student marks can be amended if they don`t have their cards - I did a couple this afternoon. My students are quite vocal, and if they were unhappy about it I would know in a few minutes - and they seem content.
I've been over and had a look - my experience is that some lecturers have spent many hours on it, the installation has messed up several machines at a time when they cannot access anything - student lists, course materials, lecture notes - without the computer. Some lecturers are tearing their hair out, and it's still not working; several have voiced the same opinion that's big brother, takes longer than it should and still doesn't yield accurate data. Certainly, accurately and reliably scanning 70 students seems to take longer than "a few" minutes - it's actually between 10 and 20 % of the available lecture time! Also, some students were spooked by it, but seem to accept it after a while. I suppose the system will settle down, but it seems inconsistent just yet - and as the original story said - many academics are spending too much time on that instead of getting on with academic work. One thing that strikes me - doesn't the data protection act bear down on the individual, so that, if any lecturers have made a mistake with the electronic register, they become liable to prosecution? surely, they will have to spend a great deal of time eradicating inaccuracies? what about students scanning their friends cards? -you'd have to do a head count as well - and does the scanner tell you how many it has registered, or does that only show up when it's eventually connected to a computer? Even then, don't you have to check the ID of each student to ensure the person matches the card? - I suppose no system is perfect, but, as I've said, whose legal liability is it if the data contains errors?
A misuse of technology and a waste of expensive academic teaching time. This is about personal student accountability and not academic babysitting of adults! Why not have networked card readers in the room, near the door. Then empower and give incentives the students to do it themselves? What is needed is smartcards with a smart solution that minimizes supervision, management and academic human intervention. This is the wrong forum to resolve this matter. The JISCMAIL Smartcards group would be a place to have this debate on HEI card related business processes. Then JISC could research a common sector solution, for the funding council to improve quality, attendance and VFM.
I think the key here is that this is one of those 'negative' solutions. What it actually aims at is to make sure that a certain body of students don't abscond, but what is implemented is that all students prove their presence - sort of guilty until proved innocent. Now, if it is indeed intended to provide actual PROOF - then dose thesystem implemented actually do that? if the evidence is only partially provable (I.e. no-one really knows that the system cannot be fiddled and therefore, it might be the very people that system is trying to monitor that are likely to go out of their way to find the fiddles) then what is that activity actually for? If it's actually a sop to the authorities, to pretend that evidence is being gathered, then it's corrupt and why should academics be required to put their name (and their scarce time) to it? It does seem that an awful lot of people, for whom proof of student attendance is not a major issue (compared with, say, the pressing need to try to engage in high-quality education in conditions of scarce resources) are engaged in a make-work activity of dubious merit. Is the whole thing a trial 'proof-of-concept' exercise to iron out the problems preparatory to the rest of us doing this? In which case, this small point is of importance to the national context of higher education. There are many questions - is it Orwellian, who pays the costs of this (is it the academics and students who are actually paying?), does it infringe on any basic human rights, will academics be held accountable for the quality of proof the system aims at? (and will they get paid for the extra responsibility?), has anyone asked the customers if they would like to pay X amount for this kind of activity, and so on.
Just watched a tech help guy spend 1.5 hours installing software on one machine - the lecturer would have spent several times that. several other lecturers still don't have it working, they say. Not quite there yet, I'd say
Apparently, I have two bottles of coke, a power supply , a mars bar and three packets of hula hoops in my class. These barcode readers are great!
I think its a real shame that nobody contacted the Students' Union at Derby to find out exactly that information before this story was published, Don, because actually I've heard no reports of students being marked as absent just for forgetting an ID Card. I'm sure I would have by now, don't you? I refute that aspect of this story entirely. I also don't think attendance monitoring is all that draconian, in all honesty - I refer you to http://www.derby.ac.uk/attendance-monitoring, which clearly shows that attendance monitoring has as much to do with pastoral duty of care as it has bums on seats. Jack Clemson Vice President Academic Affairs University of Derby Students' Union
Jack - fair play if it' s about pastoral care - but since this function in many universities is subsumed under "student retention strategy", I'm not sure that pastoral care is the aim. In respect of students being marked absent if they don't show their card - well, I don't know - but then, neither do you - it would take 3 weeks to register tis and longer than that for you to hear of it, wouldn't it?
Sorry mate - had it from the horses' mouth: "they should have their cards with them at the lecture, and if they don't, you can regards them as absent." Bear in mind that they will electronically be registered as absent unless the lecturerer manually intervenes when the data have been uploaded - what's the chances of that not going wrong, eh? - Jack, on behalf of your members, I suggest you dig a little deeper
Everything I do at work is evidence-based. If my members aren't forthcoming with this sort of information then I can't do anything about it - and I have to say, my members are pretty forthcoming. Blunt, some might say. It's my favourite quality in a student. That being said, I'd really encourage these whistleblowers to come forward for a confidential chat with me to express their concerns in a manner that will ultimately benefit my students more directly, or at the very least encourage their students to. If just one student can give me an example of this happening, then that becomes a different matter. A student experience (read: retention) strategy isn't a bad thing though, as long as you can make your peace in influencing the means rather than the end - sure, a retention strategy is ultimately commissioned with a better business in mind, but it is largely recognised amongst senior staff that mutualism very much applies here in that the best thing for the business is very often what's best for the students. In short, keeping bums on seats equates to keeping the owners of said bums in attendance, looked after and supported when they need to be. Even if I was selling the senior staff short, I couldn't deny that at the very least they have the right sentiment. In fact, the alleged problems documented in this article sound like, if they did exist, then the imperative would have reached academics after first being passed through the middle management grinder. Quite in fact, Derby's finalised student experience strategy was heavily influenced by a paper submitted by last year's outgoing President. Our relationship with the institution is strong; we act as a critical friend and as such this is why its so important that somebody - ANYBODY - affected by this comes to talk to me. Thoughts? Jack.
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