Attendance is an essential, though not always valued, component of college life. Loyola professors have decided to merge this with another academic staple—technology.
Assistant economics professors Mehmet Dicle and John Levendis have developed a new tool for attendance that does not call for an iClicker or “prehistoric” pen and paper, but rather individualized magnetic RFID, or radio frequency identification, chips read by a scanner.
This technology is used in Principles of Microeconomics, International Financial Management, Derivatives and Advanced Financial Management courses.
“Whenever students enter class, they simply place their chip near the reader. The reader ‘beeps’ to acknowledge that the chip has been read,” Levendis said. “Whenever we want to see whether a student has been attending class, we can just look at the database to see when that student beeped in.”
This easy-to-use system, it turns out, is also easy to function.
“RFID technology is similar in concept to a barcode,” Levendis said.
According to Levendis, each RFID chip has a magnetic signature that corresponds to a 10 digit ID number. The scanner then reads the number and makes a note in an online database, as well as the time and date when it was scanned. The chips, readers and database are coupled with software that allows professors and students alike to track their attendance.
Microeconomics student and music industry sophomore Justine Hamrick predicts a fruitful future for this creation.
“They seem to be beneficial, being a time saver. Instead of having to take attendance and call names, the students just scan the barcode and class can begin. There’s nothing tedious about it, a monkey could probably easily manage one,” she said.
However, monkeys, and students for that matter, can’t cheat the system.
“We set up the scanner to read only one chip every three seconds,” Levendis said. “If you wanted to scan yourself and your friend in, there would be a long awkward pause in front of the podium as you waited the three seconds for the scanner to reset.”
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