A Token-based Attendance Management System: A Cheaper and Alternative Means to Managing Records of Lecture Attendance

Keeping track of students’ lecture attendance is important as it provides the basis for enforcing the policy of having prerequisite minimum attendance to qualify for examinations. It is equally important to the parents/guardian of the students as they will be in the know of whether or not their wards have been attending lectures or not.  However, taking accurate records of student attendance manually can be tedious. Similarly, deploying attendance machines can be costly. To this end, this paper proposes designing and implementing a token-based attendance management system as an affordable and alternative approach to managing students’ attendance. In the new system, a lecturer simply counts the number of students present in a lecture session and hands them tokens. The students use the tokens to mark their presence.  The system was implemented using Hypertext Markup Language, Twitter Bootstrap, JavaScript, Hypertext Preprocessor, and MySQL. The system was deployed and put to use at Al-Qalam University Katsina. The implication of practice is that the software can be replicated, deployed and used in any academic institution.