Category: Education

Recent research Preliminary Mobile Beacon Application Framework for Higher Education Co-Curricular Engagement, presents a conceptual framework aimed at enhancing co-curricular engagement in higher education through mobile beacon technology. This technology uses location-based or proximity sensors to interact with users via mobile apps, potentially serving as a powerful tool for engaging students with co-curricular events on campus.

The motivation behind this work stems from the recognition of co-curricular activities’ importance in developing students’ character, alongside traditional academic curricula. The framework proposed seeks to address the challenges of low engagement in such activities due to students missing out on opportunities due to lack of awareness. By integrating mobile beacon technology with personalised notifications, the framework aims to inform students about co-curricular events happening within their proximity on campus, thus enhancing their engagement and participation.

A preliminary conceptual framework is detailed, focusing on the design and application of mobile beacon technology integrated with personalised notification features to support co-curricular engagement. This framework outlines the components necessary for developing such an application, including beacon devices, mobile apps, event databases and notification profiles. The document elaborates on the characterisation of these components and the processes involved in deploying and interacting with the beacon technology to deliver personalized and relevant co-curricular event notifications to students.

The document concludes by discussing the development of a prototype application based on the framework, using the Flutter framework for cross-platform mobile app development and the integration of beacon technology for real-time event notification.

Advantages of using Bluetooth beacons for automatic attendance tracking in education include:

• Improved accuracy: Bluetooth beacons can accurately detect the presence of students in the classroom, reducing the likelihood of errors in attendance tracking.
• Time-saving: Automating attendance tracking with Bluetooth beacons can save time for teachers and administrative staff, as they do not need to manually record attendance.
• Real-time tracking: Bluetooth beacons can provide real-time attendance tracking data, allowing teachers and administrative staff to monitor attendance in real-time.
• Safety and security: Alerts can be provided when students enter prohibited areas.

Bluetooth beacons can be used for automatic attendance tracking in education by placing them in the classroom or lecture hall and configuring them to detect the presence of students’ Bluetooth-enabled devices such as smartphones or tablets. When a student enters the range of the beacon, the beacon sends a signal to their device, which can then be used to record their attendance. The main problem with this setup is that students might accidentally disable detection. Not all smartphones/tablets work the same and there can be incompatibilities and the requirement for high levels of support. Also, a detection app needs to be created and distributed. The scanning for beacons can also reduce smartphone/tablet battery life.

An alternative setup is to have the students carry the beacons and use gateways to detect attendance. Data is set to a server running software such as BeaconRTLS™ or BeaconServer™. Attendance reports can run against the historical RTLS data.

The University of North Carolina (UNC) recently piloted using beacons to track student-athlete class attendance.

SpotterEDU apps were used to detect beacons to implement automated attendance monitoring. This provided a replacement for previously ad-hoc and inconsistent manual checking.

Spotter uses iBeacons to provide attendance monitoring and alerting.

The app for iOS and Android allows viewing of courses, registration for events, tracking of attendance and navigation to classes.

Read about Beacons in Education

SEAtS Software, a student attendance monitoring solution has a new article that takes a look at options for implementing student attendance monitoring. It compares using iBeacons, mag stripe card readers, GPS, WiFi and QR codes.

The article concludes that iBeacons are best because they are easy to install, provide the best accuracy, are affordable, easy to use and reduce administration time.

Read about Beacons in Education

There’s a new research paper by Charles Atherton, School of Education, University of Bristol, UK on Beacons: A tool for 21st Century teaching and learning?

Research took place in a school in the UK in June 2017 using a platform called Studywiz and the eLockers iOS app. It looked into the use of iBeacons to provide for enquiry-based learning, independent learning and individualisation.

The initial description of beacons is misleading:

“Beacons consist of a database inside a plastic casing (see Figure 2). They are ‘pas-sive’ (McDonald & Glover 2016, p. 3) pieces of technology that simply ‘push’ their content to any receptive device.”

This isn’t true. The content lies somewhere else, usually in an app or on a server.

The research found that beacons can be used to allow students to learn at their own pace while relieving teachers to provide move individual tuition. There were technical challenges with local network connectivity and closeness of beacons but these were eventually resolved.