What are some of the most common reasons for failure of the attendance process?
- Students do not have the app installed. This is the most common issue at the beginning of the term.
- The instructor initiated the attendance process without asking the students to open Acadly. Instructors should ask the students to open the Acadly app before they start attendance. If the Acadly app is not open on a student's device, the attendance process is likely to fail.
- Instructor confusing "checked in" with "present". This happens rarely but the consequences can be disproportionately large because the instructor might not record attendance at all once they see that students are "checked in".
- Internet issues. Classrooms with unreliable WiFi or LTE will report more failures than normal.
Other relatively rarer reasons for failure are:
- App permissions. As long as students grant Acadly the permissions it seeks (most importantly accessing Bluetooth on iOS and GPS on Android), things should proceed smoothly. Our troubleshooting guides for students (under "Guides and tutorials for students") should be useful.
- Phone switched off
- Hardware faults (Bluetooth radio not working on someone's phone, etc.)
Please refer to the student guide for auto-attendance, the troubleshooting guide for Android users, and the troubleshooting guide for iOS users.
The app has a number of failsafes, backups, and contextual instructions built in to address each of these issues.
For example, students are prompted to get their attendance marked manually if the process fails, as shown here:
Similarly, to help your student learn about common issues, the troubleshooting link is shown on the attendance status page to students who have not been marked present, as shown here:
What's the accuracy I can expect?
If everyone has the app installed, on average, more than 95% of all students present in a class should be marked present. This is based on historical data. If someone trains students and does dry runs in the first lecture, this number is ~98%.