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Case study

Electronic registers for Imperial College teaching

Imperial relied on heavyweight Excel workbooks—and fragile shared drives—to track who showed up, who needed follow-up, and how attendance trends informed quality conversations. Scaling that model across faculties, modalities, and professional services risked silent inconsistencies.

Together we replaced the spreadsheet scaffolding with an electronic register tuned to lecturers: unobtrusive capture at the podium, safeguards for withdrawals and mitigating circumstances references, structured exports for faculty offices, all without turning every academic into a spreadsheet wrangler after each class.

Why Excel reached its ceiling

  • Version drift when multiple departments iterate templates in isolation.
  • Friction reconciling overlapping modules, swaps, cancellations, hybrid attendance codes.
  • Operational stress when governance or external reporting suddenly requires auditable timelines.

What “good” looks like live

Delivery focused on lecturers first: resilient browser experiences, forgiving flows on flaky Wi‑Fi, optional offline buffering patterns where teaching sites demand them, respectful prompts for safeguarding notes, parity between desktop podium and circulating tablet usage.

Imperial Horizons and I-Explore Group Register: a week-by-week attendance grid with student names and CIDs, present, absent, authorised-absence and not-marked codes, the current teaching week highlighted, and a per-student attendance percentage with low values flagged.
The in-room moment: lecturers mark attendance in a few taps—present, absent, or authorised absence—while running totals and at-risk percentages update live.

Faculty oversight & governance

Professional services monitor cohort risk, trace late interventions, and package evidence for boards—without flattening nuance into anonymous CSV dumps.

Imperial Horizons and I-Explore Attendance Monitoring Dashboard: filters, OK, warning and critical summary counts, and a colour-coded table of enrolments by department and module with per-student attendance-to-date percentages and weekly attendance marks.
Department oversight: a risk heatmap surfaces cohorts slipping below threshold, with chasing emails and exports a click away—no anonymous CSV dumps.
Imperial Horizons and I-Explore register change history: a timeline of attendance amendments showing who changed a record, when, the before and after codes, and the reason—plus a note that changes cannot be deleted.
A defensible change history: every amendment records who, when, what changed, and why—evidence quality reviews and academic governance can trust.

Workflows, exports, upstream data

Whether you feed timetabling masters, student records, or downstream analytics warehouses, the register must stay the honest broker: consistent codes, explainable transforms, and controlled exports for teams who still live in Excel for certain reconciliations.

Imperial Horizons and I-Explore exports and integrations: register status codes mapped to SOLE, CSDIS and Registry attendance values with connector arrows, a validation warning, and scheduled-export toggles.
The honest broker: register codes map cleanly to SOLE, CSDIS, and registry exports, with validation catching anything that needs review before data leaves the building.
Optional student mobile flow on two phone screens: a late-arrival prompt with a confirm button, reason chips and optional location check, followed by an attendance-recorded confirmation that the lecturer has been notified.
An optional learner micro-flow for hybrid or large gateway lectures: accessible, high-contrast self-service for late arrivals, with the lecturer kept in the loop.
What we'd explore first Week 1–2 discovery · data you already have · sign-off criteria

A register project usually begins with lecturers and faculty offices, not IT diagrams. We would map the human workflow first, then the integrations.

  1. Weeks 1–2: Discovery

    • How attendance is captured today—in the room, after the fact, or not at all
    • Withdrawals, mitigating circumstances, and gateway lectures that break simple rules
    • Who must export what, and when academic governance gets nervous

  2. Data you already have

    • Spreadsheet registers and faculty office consolidation habits
    • Central student system fields you can rely on—and gaps that need bridging
    • Timetable, room, and cohort data that should drive the register view

  3. What “good” looks like for sign-off

    • Unobtrusive capture at the podium without turning academics into spreadsheet wranglers
    • Structured exports faculty offices can defend under audit
    • A phased path off Excel without a big-bang outage for teaching weeks

This is illustrative of how we begin—not a fixed statement of work. Every organisation gets a written discovery summary before build commitments.