Using Barcode to Track Student Attendance and Assets in Higher Education Institutions.

Most instructors and staff in a university environment use manual methods of tracking student attendance and college assets. However, these methods have several disadvantages; the major drawbacks of taking attendance manually are errors in data collection and the loss of part of the lecture time. As for asset tracking, the common issues are human errors in data collection, wrong inventory estimation and time wastage during the process. Automated identification and data capturing technologies can help address these issues. This paper investigates the implementation of one such system, the barcode technology, to read and process student attendance data in classroom settings and to track periodic inventory of assets within the college facilities such as devices, equipment, office furniture, classrooms, and laboratories. The paper measures faculty members and staff response on usability, comfort level, and efficiency for the proposed barcode system. This work shows that barcode technology eliminates data entry errors and improves efficiency for entering data with a minimum cost of creating barcode tags and hardware. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]