Student attendance monitoring at the university using NFC

There are several complex business processes in the higher education. As the number of university students has been tripled in Hungary the automation of these task become necessary. The Near Field Communication (NFC) technology provides a good opportunity to support the automated execution of several education related processes. Recently a new challenge is identified at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. As most of the lecture notes had become available in electronic format the students especially the inexperienced freshman ones did not attend to the lectures significantly decreasing the rate of successful exams. This drove to the decision to elaborate an accurate and reliable information system for monitoring the student's attendance at the lectures. Thus we have developed a novel, NFC technology based business use case of student attendance monitoring. In order to meet the requirements of the use case we have implemented a highly autonomous distributed environment assembled by NFC enabled embedded devices, so-called contactless terminals and a scalable backoffice. Beside the opportunity of contactless card based student identification the terminals support biometric identification by fingerprint reading. These features enable the implementation of flexible and secure identification scenarios. The attendance monitoring use case has been tested in a pilot project involving about 30 access terminals and more that 1000 students. In this paper we are introducing the developed attendance monitoring use case, the implemented NFC enabled system, and the experiences gained during the pilot project.