Hate to break it to everybody but if you've got more than one wireless access point on your network, you can track peoples' locations anyway. Not really in real time, not really with any decent granularity, but I can dump the .csv out of my Unifi network and tell you when GRETAS iPHONE goes from my parking lot WAP to my lobby WAP to my lounge WAP. Does it give me GPS? Nope. Does it give me real-time intelligence? Nope. But then, neither does this stuff. SpotterEDU has two "success stories" on its page - the depressed kid who only left her dorm for meals and "Jeff Rubin taught a large lecture of over 300 students and was able to run a report a few weeks in and identify the students missing the most class." This is pretty much what it lets you do - analyze signal strength data after the fact. If they were serious they'd geofence it: security gets an alert if a student is more than 150 feet from classrooms they're attending, for example. THAT is good and Orwellian but nobody's going to bother because that means someone has to react to the data in realtime and someone has to have the responsibility of choosing to react or not react to the data. So really, all this lets 'em do is check attendance. At a community college level you can't take a class without f'n roll call. Part of it is because there are Running Start kids in there and they're minors. Part of it is because there are work programs that require attendance for the subsidies to pay out. Part of it is because now that every white male is a potential active shooter they need attendance lists to triage mass murders. And a depressing amount of it is because every bad grade is an opportunity to litigate so collegiate performance is making a hard shift from subjective to objective. I mean, that's just a shitty app. If I'm requiring you to run my app, and I'm requiring you to run my bluetooth hotspots, but I'm not required to guarantee the veracity of their handshake? get outta here.
SpotterEDU’s terms of use say its data is not guaranteed to be “accurate, complete, correct, adequate, useful, timely, reliable or otherwise.”
On the other hand, when I teach I call roll the first week of class and that's about it. If you don't show up to any of those lectures, you get an email, and if you don't reply, you get dropped a couple weeks in when the university sends instructors the form for doing that. That sorts out anyone who forgot the class, misread their schedule, switched sections and didn't say, etc. Other than that, I don't really care if you show up? Quizzes happen at scheduled times and I send a note if there's an in-class activity that's graded, but that's it. And, yeah, other than the shitty bluetooth hardware, SpotterEDU is basically selling you a fancy button that pulls router logs and dumps them into a csv. Universities love that shit, though, because it is yet another expensive data aggregation tool that provosts can use to feel important.
Gawd sounds fucking glorious. The CNC program? Started at 7am. First 10 minutes were calling roll. If you weren't in the room by the time roll was finished, you lost a point. You could lose three points across a quarter without it negatively affecting your grade. And yes, students whose names began with "W" got ten extra minutes to get to class. Every.Day. At the other school attendance was also taken every day. Which gave the instructor a good fifteen minutes to argue with students about the pronunciation of their names. Every.Day. I think the more infantile the program, the more its students will be infantilized. I suspect that a 300-level OChem lecture is going to have a lot fewer of these traps than a 100-level English lecture but I also think that five years from now the 300-level OChem lecture won't be immune. Of course, the more spendy the college the less likely you are to put up with it; once you have your Team Elite membership it's all academic anyway.On the other hand, when I teach I call roll the first week of class and that's about it. I