Thanks @rhinox_s for your awesome questions.
Yes, this app assumes that all users (students and lecturers) has a smartphone or access to their friend’s/classmates smart phones . Here, if the user can’t afford a smartphone, they simply can create an account and take attendance using their friends devices. It simply works the way we check our Facebook, Twitter or other social media using our friends devices. From research, we are aware that not everyone can afford a smartphone and we ensured that while designing the app that it factored this challenges.
Secondly, it also, assumes that data must be activated for it to work in real time but from testing we realized that campuses still lag behind in the area of good internet connectivity. Currently, we are adding a feature that allows offline attendance to ensure that users with low or no internet connectivity will be able to effectively use the app. Also, there are other possibilities we are looking at for campuses that have low internet connectivity.
“Selfie” or facial picture is a mode of attendance alongside code attendance, that ensures that the user present at class is the actual user (Student). Part of the problem of the manual process used by over 90% of tertiary institutions in Nigeria is that students who skip lectures get their friends who will attend lectures to write in their names. In a class of over 50 students, it’s very difficult and many times impossible for the lecturers to ascertain the students that attended and those who did not attend.
Using the app, it’s expected that all users have an account on the app using their real facial picture as profile pictures. When the lecturer request for lecture attendance in this case using facial attendance, students present in class are required to take a facial picture “Selfie” for them to be successfully marked as present. Here, the app matches the selfie taken at that moment with the profile picture of that account to ensure that its the same user thus eliminating the challenge of having other students writing in their absent friends name.
Note:
The difference between the facial and code attendance is that facial attendance could be used when the lecturers want to ascertain the authenticity of students in class while code attendance could be used for meetings that does not require the authenticity of the participants (e.g, senate and management meetings) but rather an easy to use tool for capturing and processing meeting attendance.