AI technology now has the capability to manage the daily register at school, college and tertiary, and could save
taxpayers and the Government millions of dollars, while freeing up on average over 100 days of learning for each student
in just their Primary to High school years.
It also has the potential to provide the Ministry of Education critical data about utilisation of tertiary institutions
to support future policy or funding decisions for new buildings.
Using computer vision to perform facial recognition, artificial intelligence can track the arrival and departure of
students on school grounds, upload data and provide attendance records to management, the Ministry and even parents and
caregivers, in real time, and monitor safety and truancy.
Brandon Hutcheson, CEO of Aware Group, says AI has the potential to eliminate one of the most time-consuming
administrative tasks for any education institution, and achieve this with the highest levels of privacy considered.
“The solution will be implemented within the tertiary sector first with trials in place and after further consultation
with the Ministry of Education, boards of trustees, teachers, parents and students, it will be considered for primary
and secondary education, as the wider discussion about parent and student consent needs to take place.
“The benefits across the sector are significant, from freeing up valuable time, saving money, improving security, and
supporting parents and caregivers. It will also help address the growing issue of truancy and its associated costs
including policing, social services and the courts.
“On average a student will spend around 3 minutes per class waiting for their attendance to be taken. If we look at this
across 13 years in education this can amount to over 122 days lost per student.
“As well as being the foundation for funding in Education, proving attendance is an important statistic for providing
pastoral care through to building development. But in its basic form, all it does is prove we are, where we are,”
Brandon Hutcheson says.
“Discussions still need to take place regarding the impact on the student experience because simply automating
attendance registration may have other effects, be it using roll time to teach students’ patience on the mat, learning
classmates’ names and the inclusion of Te Reo.”
AI’s use in education comes at a time when tertiary institutions are under the Government microscope following
multimillion dollar bail-outs of Polytechnics over the last two years.
Brandon Hutcheson continues: “AI technology has a huge role to play in helping the tertiary education sector be more
efficient by ensuring monitoring of facility usage is optimised and then using this data to deliver better student
outcomes.
“Using AI in this way, is a very good example of technology replacing a mundane task so as to allow a more valuable
activity to occur - adopting this technology to automate registers will change the dynamic of each school day and should
bring significant benefits for all involved from each student, to the Government.”
Brandon Hutcheson will be presenting at AI Day 2019, New Zealand’s premier AI event on March 27-28th at the ASB
Waterfront Theatre, Auckland, when over 20 leading industry experts, international speakers and panelists from New
Zealand, Australia, China and the US, will be discussing how the technology is impacting business, people and society.
Tickets for AI-Day are on sale at https://www.ai-day.com