Qwickly Attendance: Card Reader Mode Compatibility, Requirements, & Configuration – Qwickly

Card Reader Compatibility and Requirements
ID Card Requirements
Enabling Card Reader Mode
More Information on Card Reader Mode Functionality

Card Reader Compatibility/Requirements

What kind of Card Readers are compatible with Qwickly Attendance?

The following types of card readers are compatible:

Magnetic stripe card readers (card swiping)
RFID card readers (card tapping)
Barcode/QR code card readers (card scanning)

Card Reader Requirements

Card readers must:

Connect to a device that can launch Qwickly Attendance (i.e., laptop, tablet, or mobile phone) via USB or Bluetooth
Have a keyboard emulation mode
Conclude the card reading string by adding "Enter" to submit the card string
- Most card readers do this by default, the rest can normally be configured to do so

ID Card Requirements

The specific type of card does not matter; as long as your card reader can read the card in questions, there are no limitations on types of cards. However, each card needs a way to be connected to a student in the system.

Student ID on card:

Many schools encode the student ID on the card (often along with other characters). This is the easiest set up, as Qwickly Attendance will automatically look for student IDs within the card reading interface. If student IDs are encoded magnetically or on barcode/QR codes, this set up will work out of the box.

Student ID Not on card:

Some schools do not encode the Student ID on the card in anyway, or they use a card system that is not aware of the student ID.

There are two ways around this:

Many clients feed the 'card number' of each student into another field in their LMS, such as the company field, which Qwickly Attendance can key off.
If you are unable to push card numbers into LMS fields and want to use a field outside of username, SIS ID, or email to store user information for Card Reader Mode, Qwickly Attendance allows institutions to use a 'Custom Associated ID' to store a custom value field which can be used when taking attendance using Card Reader Mode.
- More information on Custom Associated IDs can be found at https://qwickly.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045409411-Qwickly-Attendance-Using-Custom-Associated-IDs
- Custom Associated IDs can now be managed via the Qwickly Attendance API. More information is available at https://qwickly.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/40367409519885-Qwickly-Attendance-API

Enabling Card Reader Mode

You can enable Card Reader Mode in Attendance LTI by the following steps:

Log in to the Qwickly Administrator Dashboard (https://www.qwickly.tools/, https://uk.qwickly.tools/, or https://au.qwickly.tools/)
Click 'Manage Attendance' and navigate to 'Settings' in the left-hand navigation, then to the 'Modes' tab
Check box next to Card Reader and save your settings

By default, the Card Reader Identifier will be set to the SIS ID. Alternate identifiers can be chosen in the Identifier settings by picking the desired identifier option.

More Information on Card Reader Mode Functionality

How is an Attendance Record created when a user swipes their card?

When Qwickly Attendance is loaded in a course, the tool loads the course enrollments. After getting the enrollments for a course, the enrolled users' data is loaded into the tool (including whatever value they may have chosen as a Card Reader Identifier). When a card is swiped, Qwickly Attendance then iterates through all the user's identifiers and tries to find a match for the received card swipe input. If a pattern matching a user's identifier is found in the card, then Qwickly Attendance records attendance for that particular user.

An Example of Taking a Card Reader Attendance Session

Consider a course that has 20 students. One of the students (let's call them John) has the SIS ID "24001101"

The students will swipe a card that is designed to have their SIS ID in the Card Reader string. An example card reader string could be ";000000000000000000000024001101!"

When a card is swiped, the tool receives this card reader string. Qwickly Attendance will then try to find each one of the 20 students' SIS IDs in the card reader string. In this case, there is a positive match for the SIS ID "24001101", which belongs to our student, John. At this point the tool marks John present.