Tracking Participation with Tech in Higher Education:

The recently-published NPR article, University Attendance Scanners Make Some Uneasy, reported how Northern Arizona University is installing electronic scanners outside some large lecture halls to track attendance.

While it may be the first American educational institution to try the badge-scanning technology, institutions' use of technology to track student participation in class activities and discussions is nothing new. Modern online learning management systems, such as Moodle, have been widely adopted by higher education institutions throughout the United States; include the capability for instructors to monitor student participation in the online component of courses.

As the article states, while some instructors feel that students should hold themselves responsible for class participation and overall involvement in the course material, other instructors have found that attendance and active participation does matter, and therefore, factor class participation into students' grades. Additionally, Universities also have a strong financial incentive to retain their students (it costs about $400 to recruit a single student to a public school, nearly $2,000 to a private college and every time a student drops out, that process starts all over again).

Tracking participation may have its benefits to campus faculty and administration, but what do students think? As stated in the report, technology on 21st century campuses can limit a student's feelings of privacy and relative anonymity. But perhaps the more pressing discussion lies in whether or not holding students accountable to their level of course participation affects their initiative and freedom to achieve in their own particular way.

Although the badge scanner technology implemented on the Northern Arizona University campus currently lacks the capability to track a student's level of interaction while they're in the classroom, modern learning management technologies, such as Moodle, can dive deeper into student participation to assess the effectiveness of the online component of higher education courses.

So the question remains, what are the best practices to promoting participation without diminishing student initiative and feelings of freedom? Should an institution implement a campus-wide policy or should faculty be given the freedom to determine the lengths at which student interaction and participation be tracked and graded? Let us know your thoughts.