Summary
01 — Problem
The Core Problem
In many tier 2 & tier 3 cities schools, tracking leaves and staff payroll is still done on paper, filling up entire record rooms and creating administrative burden that takes time away from teaching.
After talking with teachers we learned that due to poor experience with existing software, staff were still taking attendance on paper registers and logging the data digitally only on weekends.
For staff attendance, grade A & B schools had biometric punch-in machines, but grade C & D schools were still working entirely on manual registers.
"We have installed attendance taking app but…. teachers are still used to taking the attendance on pen and paper, then only inputting (data entry) at the end of the week"
Shikha Verma
MS Bright Education Academy
02 — Research
Research & Key Insights
We met school administrators & teachers across tier 2 & tier 3 cities with the sales team to understand their current approach on digital tools for a daily problem like attendance.
We learnt that problem was not about awareness of digital tools, but the friction that those tools were creating.
Real adoption for them meant an experience simple enough to use in front of a classroom in real time.
Research Method
Interviews with school admins and teachers across grade C & D schools to understand restraint of digital attendance tools to identify adoption blockers.
03 — Solution
Execution
Student Attendance
With the goal of automating student attendance we designed the app to be installed on any affordable android phone with internet connectivity, the device can be installed outside each classroom.
With face match, any student walking inside would be marked present. We also had several safety measures with liveliness detection & auto logout based on location of device to prevent misuse.
Students were able to mark entry within 2-3 seconds of scanning, and parents get notified on WhatsApp when they enter or leave the premises.
Student Face Attendance
Place Devices in front of classrooms
Automatic Attendance in 2-3 seconds
Parents get notified
Liveliness detection for safety
Alternative Student Attendance
After only 892 Student Attendance was taken using face attendance app due to several reasons including but not limited to
Frequent power cuts
Poor network connectivity
Performance issues on phones (lighting issues or low quality camera)
We concluded that this is not as reliable as we had hoped and student attendance automation with face scanning is a long way to go in India.
Alternative Student Attendance
We designed the attendance interface where all teacher had to was open the app and click on take attendance, with timetable feature the correct class was almost always open by default.
All the teachers had to do was call out roll numbers one by one and simply, tap/select students who are absent and click on save.
This was the same performance the teachers were doing with the paper registrars anyway so it felt very easy to adopt instead.
Select Absent Students
Attendance approach very similar to paper registrar process
Call students one by one based on roll no.
Only select Absent students and click save to mark attendance directly.
Absent Students parent's get notified on WhatsApp automatically unless leave is submitted by parents
Staff Attendance
Although the app didn't meet our expectations for student attendance, For Staff it was completely opposite.
01
Staff Face Attendance
We asked the administrator to download the app on each employee
Simply open the app when inside school premises and scan your face
Clock-in & clock-out is now done automatically based on location + face attendance data
Staff Payroll
The goal with staff attendance was to enable salary calculation via payroll automation with administrative rules for late entry, early leave or overtime calculation.
Time rules set up by the school feed directly into staff payroll calculations, eliminating the need to manually cross reference attendance registers with pay cycles.
Payroll Automation
We asked the administrator to download the app on each employee
Simply open the app when inside school premises and scan your face
Clock-in & clock-out is now done automatically based on location + face attendance data
04 — Results
Impact
Qualitative Impact
Teachers now take attendance digitally in real time reducing paper usage.
Admin can effectively manage staff capacity with dashboard trend analysis, and teachers gained back time previously spent on daily paperwork.
Staff Capacity
Admin can identify in one place the complete attendance data for staff & class-wise attendance
Quantitative Impact
67.9%
1.5K +
2 Lakh +
05 — Conclusion
Learnings & Conclusion
Adoption isn't guaranteed by building the right feature, it depends on building the right experience around it.
Face attendance for students didn't perform as expected and went through multiple iterations before the focus shifted to staff attendance.
Learnings
If the friction is high enough, people will revert to paper even when a digital alternative exists.
When engineering builds for functionality and design closes the gap between how software works and how people actually think, the result is always better business outcomes.
