Asynchronous Virtual/Online Classes: Missing and Late assignments mark student absent.

[jbeyer1]

Institutions of higher education must have procedures in place to document attendance for financial aid purposes. Federal Student Aid (FSA) funds are awarded to a student based on the assumption that the student will attend college for the entire period for which the assistance is awarded. If a student does not begin attendance in all of his or her classes, resulting in a change in the student’s enrollment status, the College must recalculate the student’s award based on the lower enrollment status. Likewise, when a student withdraws from or stops attending all classes before the 60 percent point of the semester (last day to withdraw without academic penalty) has passed, the student may no longer be eligible for the full amount of Title IV funds originally received. As a result, it is necessary to have a procedure in place to determine whether or not a student began attending and continued attending classes through the 60 percent point of the semester. The Department of Education does not dictate the method a college uses to document attendance; however, a student is considered NOT to have begun attendance in any class in
which the college is unable to document that attendance

I am not sure how other people document attendance in their asynchronous online/virtual classes, but at my college a student is marked absent if they do not submit or submit an assignment after the due date as absent.  I would be very helpful has an instructor if I had the options to:

1. Pick my major assignments that I could use as attendance markers (i.e. labs and quizzes)
2. Enable Attendance in Canvas.
3. Based on what I selected as the assignments to use for attendance, then have those dates automatically populate as the days of the week students should be attending "class".
4. If a student doesn't submit, or they submit an assignment late, then that student is marked absent.  
5. If two or more major assignments are due on the same date, then failure to submit or submit them by the due date would result in an absence, but if a student submits one of the group of assignments they will be marked tardy.  However, ideally these would all be options that faculty could select. 

The current problem with the new attendance feature in analytics is that attendance is controlled at the adminstrative level and it's one size fits all.  There is no way to customize your class.  In addition, students in virtual classes "attend" at different times and days.  However for RSI purposes and student financial aid, the federal government requires insitutions to keep track of attendace.  While New Analytics is a great addition, students that are no longer active in the class have to be sorted out and it's a bit burdensome to use as a result, even when I filter by assignment.  I also have to go in twice to find missing assignments and late assignments. 

If attendence could be automated for asynchronous classes based on late or missing assignments, it would make it much easier to keep track of these students.  If the settings were controlled by faculty, then I could turn it on and customize my settings for my asynchronous class but turn in off for my face to face classes where attendance is based on actually showing up for a face to face class or a synchronous Zoom session. 

[ProductPanda]

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