Conceptualizing an Attendance Monitoring System for Malaysian Educational Institutions

Abstract

Absenteeism monitoring is one of the problems faced by many organizations, especially universities. The difficulties to properly manage students’ attendance and its subsequent actions and potential responses to certain problems have caused the underutilization of organizational resources. Therefore, the objective of this study is twofold: first, the study aims to investigate the problems related to absenteeism management among academicians, while secondly, the study also aims to develop an integrated platform for the proper management of absenteeism. To address the research objectives, a study was conducted in two phases: (1) a qualitative study investigating the problems associated with absenteeism management among academicians at Universiti Teknologi MARA, Kelantan, and (2) development of a prototype system based on the rapid application development methodology. Findings show that respondents prefer a user-friendly information system compared to the conventional method. Moreover, the tedious process of absenteeism reporting forced respondents to ignore such reporting; instead, they chose to act on their own. Based on the 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 which are personal and technological. In terms of the application, the result shows that the implementation of a new platform has increased the number of reporting, improved the transparency of the absenteeism process, as well as reduced 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, and secondly the paper proposes an integrated platform for the absenteeism monitoring process. The implications of the study and future directions for research are outlined.