Smart Attendance Management System - Your Smart School Buddy

Absenteeism monitoring is one of the problems faced by many organizations especially universities. The difficulties to properly manage students’ attendance, its subsequent action and potential responses to certain problems caused the underutilization of organizational resources. Therefore, the objective of this study is twofold: first to investigate the problems related to absenteeism management among academician, second to develop an integrated platform for proper management of absenteeism records. To addresses the research objectives, a study was conducted in two phases: (1) qualitative studies investigating the problems associated with absenteeism management among academician at Universiti Teknologi MARA Kelantan branch, and (2) prototype development of the system based on rapid application development methodology. Findings show that respondents prefer a user-friendly information system compared to conventional method. Moreover, the tedious process of absenteeism reporting forced respondents to ignore such reporting; instead, act into their own hand. Based on qualitative findings, four problems were identified; (1) missing of student attendance, (2) difficulty to monitor and track student attendance, (3) difficulties to bring the attendance sheets, and (4) difficulty to download the attendance sheet. These problems are grouped into two themes; personal, and technological. In term of the application, the result shows that the implementation of a new platform increases the number of reporting, improve the transparency of the absenteeism process, as well as reduce the number of absenteeism cases. The contributions of this paper are as follows: first, the paper provides insight on the problems associated with absenteeism management in the context of Malaysian educational institutions; second, the paper proposes an integrated platform for absenteeism monitoring process; finally, the implications of the study and future directions for research are outlined.