After having a look around at various reason why NFC would be useful to have I hit a problem.
The original idea was to have an NFC reader on each desk but the cost would be far too high. I based my idea on having a class of 20 each needing a tag and a reader. Having a NFC reader per person (depending on the type of reader) would cost anywhere from £20 to over £150 and in some cases much more. Whereas the tags seem to be around £1.60 since people are careful not to lose their phone the cost of having to buy readers/receivers is sugnificantly cut.
It makes much more sense to have the tags on the desks. As the average student has a mobile device it makes more sense to flip the idea upside down, however even then there is a problem with this idea. A large amount of people use iPhones which are not currently NFC enabled, the iPhone 6 and 6s have NFC but from what I’ve read is only active for the Apple Pay service. Leaving this idea only open to ‘most’ Android users.
The idea now is to have a tag at each desk and use the student’s mobile to scan the tag and be directed to an online asset, most likely a webpage where they put their student number and submit that instead of waiting to have a paper register handed around, still this idea would have a high startup cost but would help reduce the ammount of paper used and has potential to be more accurate.
The main thing that needs to be added is an incentive. Often lectures are skipped by a few and attendence is an issue with a few students in most institutions however an incentive for a high attendence rate may help reduce this problem.