iPhones May Help Japanese University Catch Absent Students

The days of skipping class for students at one Japanese university are over.

At least that’s the hope of administrators at Aoyama Gakuin University, in Tokyo, whose School of Social Informatics will give Apple’s iPhone 3G to 550 of its students as a way to track attendance with the phone’s global-positioning system.

Attendance is an important graduation requirement at the university, the Associated Press reported, and in the past, students would fake attendance by asking friends to answer attendance roll calls or hand in signed attendance sheets with their signatures.

In the new system, students will be required to enter their ID number into an iPhone application at the beginning of class. The phone will pinpoint the students’ location when they do, to ensure they are actually on campus.

Administrators at the university acknowledge that students could give their iPhones to classmates to sign in for them, but say the young men and women are not likely to part with their mobile devices.

The university also hopes students in the school, which focuses on Internet and technology use in society, will use the phones for other purposes, like developing new applications.

Programs at several American colleges and universities require students to use iPhones for class or assignments. Abilene Christian University was the first to give away iPhones or iPod Touch devices to about 1,000 freshmen last fall.

Bill Rankin, director of educational innovation at the university and also an associate professor of English, said he thinks his university would be “leery” of using the phones to track students.

“One of the things we want to remember is that this is a place that people are becoming adults and taking on responsibility, and one of those responsibilities is showing up for class,” Mr. Rankin said. “We have attendance policies in place, but if a student decides to take a day to do something else, and some of those things are useful, that’s their prerogative.”

If the university were to use the iPhones’ global-positioning system on campus, Mr. Rankin said, it would likely be an “opt-in,” not an “opt-out,” application, meaning students could choose whether to participate.

Professors at the university do have a Web service that shows pictures of each student when attendance is called, Mr. Rankin said. The university has also talked about creating a system in which students could sign into class using a pin code, though that has yet to be developed. — Erica R. Hendry