EZCheck.me – QR-based attendance tracker for the hybrid learning age

We’ve all been there: the need for tracking attendance at the beginning of the lesson is a true hassle that nobody wants to deal with. The students hate it for obvious reasons, but surprisingly, the instructors hate it even more: they want to teach, not to act as police officers. However, most academic institutes enforce attendance tracking, and rightly so: studies show again and again strong positive correlation between class attendance and grades. Moreover, in a world where traditional educational institutes are increasingly competing with online academies, the attendance statistics became one of their most important key performance indicators (KPIs).

The hybrid learning era presents new challenges to the attendance issue: while in classrooms, tracking attendance is mostly still done by calling out names, an unbelievably tedious process that is highly inaccurate, wastes time, and very easy to cheat, at online lessons, instructors rely on the video platform build-in lists, which has their own issues: students are using fake/ Inconsistent names, there is no support for hybrid courses, and the instructors can’t tell which students attended the course from were (in-class or on-line). This makes it extremely hard to keep track of each lesson’s attendance, and to calculate each student’s attendance rate at the end of the course.

This is exactly where EZCheck.me steps in. They provide a simple, yet brilliant zero-hardware virtual attendance tracker solution: at the beginning of the lesson the instructor presents a ‘Check-in’ session screen to her attendees, which includes a dynamic QR code. The attendees scan it with a dedicated App, and their attendance is registered. The process is blazingly fast – taking attendance of a large class with hundreds of attendees takes less than a minute.

The attendance reports are aggregated online and can be downloaded and integrated into any LMS system. The platform also presents the instructor with an insightful dashboard that shows the course attendance trend over time, and alerts about possible drop-off attendees that missed too many sessions in a row.

The solution is quite comprehensive. First, the QR code itself is dynamic and is changing every couple of seconds, so it is very hard to game the platform: the students must scan during the lesson, in real-time. EZCheck.me also provides an alternative check-in method for students that cannot scan the QR code.

Secondly, students can use the App to ask their instructors for a late Check-in for lessons they missed. So instead of handling multiple requests via Email and other communication channels, the whole attendance management is done in one, central point, and the instructors can simply approve or deny any late check-in request with one click.

The solution requires no hardware, and is platform-agnostic, so it can be used both at physical classrooms and remote lessons through any video conferencing tool such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex and more: If you can share your screen and run a presentation, you can use EZCheck.me.

One of the unexpected benefits of this setup is geolocation: the instructor can pinpoint on the location of the course on a map, and this way the platform can tell who checked-in from the classroom and who from a remote location. This will probably become an especially useful feature during the hybrid learning age.

EZCheck.me addresses a triple pain:

The students – can follow their attendance history through EZCheck.me’s App

The instructors – becomes free of the pain of checking attendance by calling out names at the beginning of each lesson.

The educational institutes – received detailed real-time status of the attendance which can be analyzed and shared.

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EZCheck.me is already in use in over 120 US- based universities, colleges, and schools. Its basic plan is completely free, and it provides a check-in solution for unlimited courses.