A way to quickly check attendance for asynchronous instruction

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Our digital learners have several ways to be counted present for each of their seven class periods, but the process of taking attendance is beyond time-consuming for teachers. Because students have some flexibility in regards to when they are completing the work remotely, having the teachers use the Attendance function is not feasible. We can check People to see if the last login was that day, but then teachers are expected to check 1,000 times a day, which is not feasible. We do not want to encourage an assignment for every course, every day because work should be different than attendance. 

Our temporary fix has been to have a teacher-created attendance button at the top of every home page. Students click on the button to be directed to the teacher's Google Form and submit. The next day, the teacher uses the form to enter the attendance. The only problem is that some kids will not click on the button or they do the work and forget to click the button. At that point, parents are frustrated and trying to point to completed work as proof of class attendance. However, if we don't have a uniform way to take attendance, then our teachers are spending all of their time on attendance instead of designing great lessons and content. 

We need a way for teachers to quickly take asynchronous attendance without having to go student by student in access reports or assignments. Maybe there could be an engagement capture report that shows who did not enter that specific course from 12:00 am-11:59 pm for each day. It would need to be accessed faster than New Analytics updates to adhere to district policies. I'm not sure, but we definitely need something to help navigate attendance woes within our new normal!

10 Comments
Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni
Status changed to: Open
 
kcoldwell
Community Novice

This would be really helpful

anne_sutton
Community Member

I 100% agree with this. As a teacher, it is difficult to filter through students who engage in the course and students who do not. Likewise, my students are on an alternating hybrid schedule, so there are some kids at home on Mondays while others are at school on that day. I need to be able to see at a glance if they've participated. The new "reports" option that has been added in New Analytics is closer to what I need, but it is cumbersome click New Analytics, filter by date/course, download in Excel, and sort through that data. Likewise, it would be helpful if in that filter process, a "groups" filter was added. By putting my kids in A groups and B groups in the People tab, I can better see at a glance in the gradebook which of my kids have been engaging in the course at home. Adding this as a filter option in that reports feature would be super helpful as well. 

robinwilson16
Community Member

I was hoping it was going to be possible to obtain participation/attendance reports for online classes based on if a student completed all the tasks that had been set for that specific lesson.

However, after speaking to support, this is not possible and I was advised to post it here so it could be considered as a future feature.

There is a Roll Call report but this requires someone to manually mark all the classes as they would a register when the data should already exist in the database assuming tasks were assigned and completed.

I was hoping for something similar to the following:

Participation.png

 

With the increase in Online Learning due to lockdown and self-isolation the organisation need to monitor participation at a strategic level to know which areas/depts have issues and may need further support. At present there is no visibility into participation levels and it would appear this is not possible without asking staff to manually record this as they would if students were physically in class.

Please can this be considered or does anyone have any other suggestions as to how I might solve this or obtain this data? Ideally it needs to be straightforward as the college is supposed to submit daily attendance/participation figures so lots of VLOOKUPS would not be ideal.

Thanks

Robin

patti_eaves
Community Member

This would be extremely helpful for teachers!  The statement was made teachers are spending so much time trying to take attendance, because of state requirements.  That is the dislike of Canvas in our district, having to spend so much time trying to take attendance.

atanner
Community Explorer

The new analytics report is not helpful because it is not showing that all my kids logged in.  I had a kid turn in an assignment, but when I went to go pull his activity it says he never logged on.  How does that work?

atanner
Community Explorer

 

@robinwilson16 I like your idea and I think the original idea would work as well @Adunn5 .
robinwilson16
Community Member

Hello

Has anyone come any closer to a solution as to how to track which students have completed their assigned work (at a summary level) as with lockdown 3 now in full effect in the UK I could really do with this as we need to report attendance/participation to the ESFA (so if there are 5 questions/activities and they have provided 5 answers then this would be classed as an attendance, if they have not provided answers then they would be classed as absent).

This information should be in the Canvas database and without visibility of this information at an overall college level, what should be an easy task, becomes impossible.

There appears to have been no development in this area since the original question that was posted back in October last year.

Stef_retired
Instructure Alumni
Instructure Alumni
Comments from Instructure

New Analytics includes an Attendance tab, which updates according to criteria set at the account level. This change allows criteria to update attendance information for individual courses and remove manual attendance tracking. 

For more information, please read through  Canvas Release Notes (2021-08-21).

ProductPanda
Instructure
Instructure
Status changed to: Archived
Comments from Instructure

As part of the new Ideas & Themes process, all ideas in Idea Conversations were reviewed by the Product Team. Any Idea that was associated with an identified theme was moved to the new Idea & Themes space. Any Idea that was not part of the move is being marked as Archived. This will preserve the history of the conversations while also letting Community members know that Instructure will not explore the request at this time.