NFC-based Mobile Application for Student Attendance in Institution of Higher Learning

Manual student attendance taking has become a tedious and time-consuming task for lecturers in Institution of Higher Learning (IHL). When pandemic is becoming endemic, more countries are opening their borders for international students retuning to campus and attending in-person classes. While lecturers circulate the manual attendance list to students in class, the list may be a contaminated object. According to WHO, a person could catch COVID-19 by touching the contaminated objects and then touching their mouth, eyes, or nose. In order to address these problems, a NFC-based mobile application is proposed. The proposed method is making use of NFC technology in the mobile devices. Students just need to tap the lecturers’ NFC-enabled mobile devices while entering the lecture hall, then student attendance are recorded automatically in the database. The findings show that the proposed method improve students’ attendance taking more efficiently in terms of reducing time and efforts. At the same time, reduce chances of getting COVID-19 by avoid touching on possible contaminated objects during attendance taking in class. In this study, constraint of the proposed method is unstable and low coverage of WiFi or mobile network in lecture hall. The constraints disable the attendance taking to be completed in stipulated time. This constraint needs to be addressed in future work.