What’s the Future of Student ID cards?

Digital media has become an integral part of our daily lives. And the vision of transparent access to diverse student services such as library access, paying at student restaurants and cafeterias, using local public transport or transferring digital files, etc., has become the norm in some institutions.

Although many institutions have worked to improve their tools and teaching tools through smart boards, digital textbooks, and online courses, few schools are interested in the student's overall experience— including digital student ID cards. Student School IDs are a central tool for providing an outstanding student experience through technology. Modern all-in-one ID cards can enable everything from access control to payments and campus transportation. It can also exceed Gen Z expectations by addressing their desire for personalised experiences while complementing and even enhancing university branding initiatives. These innovations and speeding up the release process can help cultivate an experience that will appeal to incoming freshmen.

Regardless of the noticeable market gap and availability, we can expect full-fledged digital student ID card with many features in the future. Let's try and see what prospective changes and features we can expect in digitised student ID cards in the near future.

Educational institutions being fully ready for the digital student ID revolution

Educators at all levels are looking to leverage today's technology to enhance learning, simplify administrative tasks, and protect students. However, tighter budgets, growing student numbers, and rising costs per student are some of the many obstacles institutions generally face. Meeting these challenges requires innovative solutions to automate student ID access to facilities and classrooms, improve campus security, and streamline campus services.

In many ways, schools have slowly adopted technologies commonly used in the private sector to streamline their operations. Institutions on higher education campuses have moved to online enrollment and course registration. However, students still have to visit the main office in person and line up to receive their student cards. Inefficiencies due to manual processes persist after the first week of school, as student tardiness is an ongoing problem. Often, students have to stop at their desks to pick up a handwritten note late, wasting time on classroom activities. Still, advances in smart ID card technology and the surrounding infrastructure will provide teaching schools with the ultimate solution to streamline administrative tasks.

Self-sovereign identities

For many educational organisations and institutions fraught with individual liberties and concerns about centralized digital IDs for students, the future may lie in an autonomous identity in which students and educational institutions fully own their data without outside intervention.

This is where individuals can create data partners and scan their mobile digital IDs. It also aligns with broader developments in data regulation. The aim might be to increase individuals' confidence in how their data will be used and to encourage more data sharing. With more improved digital technology, no central repository of information will be compromised.

Students can mostly set up, manage, share and withdraw specific parts of their identity with organizations, depending on their needs.

Developing off-campus affiliate programs

Large numbers of students at universities and university campuses fill the surrounding community with a fixed consumer audience. Smart ID cards bring campus and community together to create value-added opportunities for local shops, restaurants and service providers when students use their campus ID cards as visitor cards for the loyalty of restaurants and retail stores. Students will use their ID on or off campus and earn credits and incentives for additional purchases. Affiliate programs can also extend beyond the local community into influential brands. When combined with a customer relationship management (CRM) database, smart card purchases can provide valuable data for marketing metrics, further enhancing affiliate programs.

Implementing RFID technology

In educational institutions, attendance is essential for maintaining student records and providing attendance summaries. Teachers spend a significant amount of time marking students' presence. It is a long and iterative process in which the teacher calls the student's name, and the student responds by confirming their presence. The process will be simplified by automating it with RFID technology. This will free staff from tedious tasks and save valuable classroom time. It reduces the heavy workload of teachers by digitising the process.

Radiofrequency systems work faster than other systems (barcodes and biometrics). They also improve data security by ensuring no data manipulation when providing role-based access. RF Attendance tends to provide robust, automated and secure attendance management. With this system, student attendance management becomes simpler, more efficient and more accurate. This system will also be able to eliminate the risk of agent attendance and operations in attendance status. This will automate the entire registration, attendance registration and data processing system on presence servers.

Electronic payments for food, beverages and bookstores

By leveraging digital ID cards, students will be able to top up their multipurpose ID card with a meal credit, allowing the ID card to be used as a debit card, at vending machines and in the dining room. The ID card may include a prepaid spending account that students use to make purchases at student shops, dining venues, and school events. Parents and students can access online accounts to view transactions, add funds, and set up automatic allocations. The benefits go beyond buying food and drink. Students will also be able to use their smart ID card to purchase books, pay for temporary on-campus parking, and settle for parking tickets.

Final words

Due to the increasing functionality of the card, as well as the desire of administrators to improve student safety and create a more effective school environment, ID cards are becoming a more critical tool in schools.

Chamera Digital Student ID solution is here to revolutionise the way schools work. Their innovative approach ensures a flexible and smooth online solution for obtaining digital student ID cards for your school, making life easy for school administrators and students. Keeping the future trends, efficiency and versatility of a digital student ID card in mind, Chamera - an integrated digital student ID app, makes it a reality from the first day of the school year; using smart and intuitive software allows you to manage your entire digital map creation process from start to finish.

I am a freelance writer and an independent blogger who writes about modern technology, globalisation and home improvement. He aspires to become a professional writer and make a difference in society and the world we live in.