Digitalization and data management of lab attendance system

• Main Author: Soh, Zu Wei
• Other Authors: Loke Yuan Ren
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2024
• Subjects: Computer and Information Science
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/181197
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Lab sessions are a core part of the curriculum at NTU College of Computing and Data Science (CCDS). With 19 lab rooms and up to 100 lab sessions daily with thousands of students, the current paper-based attendance marking system poses serious operational difficulties. Currently, lab executives manually compile and process the attendance for each session. Furthermore, for each absence, the lab executives must manually notify each and every student via email, collect absence justifications and schedule make-up lessons manually by checking the lab schedules one by one while coordinating with the student’s availability to find the best available slot. Moreover, with the high and increasing volume of students in NTU CCDS, it is more and more difficult for lab executives to manage as these processes are not only extremely time-consuming but also prone to human errors. To address these issues, the project conducted a thorough investigation of existing solutions together with user research from stakeholders, then designed and developed a digital lab attendance system from scratch. The new system digitalises and automates the entire attendance process, from marking attendances to automated absence email notifications and custom algorithms that calculate availability and automatically recommend make-up lab sessions. Lab executives and teaching faculty are provided with a powerful centralised platform to view and manage courses, view lab schedules, manage attendances, approve absences, analyse dashboard analytics to view attendance trends, catch students with low attendance rates and much more. Additionally, the system is designed to be production-ready, ensuring system resilience through features such as offline capability in face of network disruptions, customisable role-based access account management, audit trails, anti-virus scanning to handle absence justification uploads from students, and automatic scheduled database backups. To bring this system to life, 2 different frontend applications (Web App and Tablet App) together with 1 backend server were developed, comprising 74 distinct APIs that manage everything from attendance marking to analytics and absence approvals. The system will also be pilot-tested in one of NTU’s CCDS labs with the goal of replacing the current paper-based attendance marking approach.