Attendance Overhaul

(36)
Right now attendance in Canvas isn't that useful/effective. Below are the ways it could be improved:
  • When viewing a specific student's information allow faculty to see a snapshot of the whole semester, including the specific date that a student was present, absent, late, etc. Knowing the number of days a student has been absent is useful, but for financial aid and other state regulated things we have to provide the specific date of last attendance. Right now this is very clumsy and time consuming.
  • Allow for additional states other than present, late, absent - ex: excused
  • Allow students to view their own attendance report. Right now students can't see their attendance information at all. Make it an option for faculty to allow students to view their own attendance for a semester by date. It would also be useful if there was an option to let students mark their own attendance - ex: they enter in the code for the day to show that they are in class.
  • Provide a print/save option for the entire roster that shows the attendance information by student and date.
  • Provide a more user-friendly data file of the attendance information. As it is right now it is quite messy and unless faculty are comfortable and familiar with excel they have a difficult time doing anything with the data file.
  • Make it an option whether or not attendance information is automatically added to the gradebook. Yes, I know the Roll call attendance assignment can be turned off, but it is confusing and many new faculty don't realize why it's there or what to do with it.
360 Comments
lisa_mitchell
Community Novice

We have significant issues with Roll Call within the Canvas app. Most of our Instructors use the app to take attendance in class, but the attendance section just does not work for some individuals. The issues are not consistent with a particular make or model of phone, it seems to be an issue within the app. 

ahayson
Instructure
Instructure

Thanks  @lisa_mitchell ‌ for your valuable feedback.

Giving consideration to the Attendance LTI being responsive in Canvas Applications would be awesome for us as RTO's who are trying to track engagement as part of legislative/ audit requirements. 

If the feature itself is a bit chop and change across devices, I think it might even be worth posting a ticket with support. 

We value your #insights into helping us make Canvas even more awesome! Smiley Happy

- Am

swinter
Community Champion

All these comments are useful, but again I ask, shouldn't Canvas provide a tool that is compliant with the federal requirements since so many schools must be in compliance (for example, to provide financial aid)? 

We are obligated to keep track of the exact amount of time a student is physically in class since we are a clock-hour program. We need a way for the teachers (or students if it has to be) to take attendance based on time in and time out. I know we cannot be the only school that is required to do this by the feds. 

Roll Call does allow for marking late, but not how late by time, only down to 80%. The Grade Book allows for more adjustment of the percentage, but now the teacher has to go to a second page to make that adjustment. There has to be an easier way to record the time someone comes to class, so that precise time calculations can be performed even if the report is output to excel, and within one attendance webpage.

jcrawford
Community Contributor

Totally agree!  Since Canvas is being so widely marketed and used in the K-12 setting, shouldn't an attendance feature (that is robust enough to handle the needs of a traditional, state funded district) be standard?  I'm looking to find work arounds and/or ways to export from Canvas and then import to our SIS, but it would be wonderful if attendance could just be "passed back" like grades.  

ahayson
Instructure
Instructure

Hey  @aliciamajor 

Here is the information surrounding the Attendance feature we have been discussing as of late. If you can please vote‌ and provide any other information around ideas you think could be valuable (that may not have been discussed as of yet). Thanks!

- Am

dewell_justin
Community Novice

We especially could use a more robust way to change notification settings for Roll Call. Instructors do not like getting tons of daily emails about attendance.

kbink
Community Contributor

I think I checked all the comments, but a running total for total number of absences would be really useful, whether it is in the gradebook, in the attendance report or in any of the new features.  For our case,  students fail a course if they have 4 absences.  While the Fail grade is handled manually, it would be great to actually see the total number of absences.  If you can figure out how to tie attendance to an override grade, that would be amazing! 

Chris_Munzo
Partner
Partner

 @kbink ‌ - Our Dropout Detective does tie to Roll Call and provide this information at the student level:

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eric_kuha
Community Novice

There are few new ideas that I can contribute to this thread except to say this:

Right now, Roll Call attendance is essentially useless. It doesn't do anything that an attendance module should do. The reports it pulls are terrible and unreadable. Students can't access their OWN attendance.

So my 2 cents: If this doesn't get fixed by next fall, I am going to begin campaigning at my institution to abandon Canvas very hard.

I mean. come on. How hard is it to implement an attendance module? Why in the world would you outsource it to an external tool??

kblack
Community Champion

 @eric_kuha ‌ - While I, too, am certainly no big fan of the attendance tool--and yes, it desperately needs an overhaul--for the record, students can now see their attendance record.  Some details are here, if you're interested:  https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10697-4212643081 

kbink
Community Contributor

Thank you Ken! I needed that information.

On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 1:00 PM, kblack@dom.edu <instructure@jiveon.com>

jschwarz
Community Novice

From a higher ed perspective, there are regulatory requirements that we need to meet regarding attendance records. The current attendance LTI is not robust enough to provide reporting to satisfy these requirements. Our main need is to have a mechanism to show which faculty/courses are taking attendance and those that are not utilizing the attendance "Roll Call" feature. We also need a way to report more than a week at a time to find out when students stopped attending a course. 

jesse_phomsouva
Community Novice

Within the VET/RTO sector (not sure if America has a similar education sector) but we have very stringent rules which require us to report an overall possible percentage of attendance for an entire semester (not just course specific, but for all courses as an average). This is to fulfil visa requirements mostly but we must monitor when a student drops down to 80% possible attendance for the semester.

Currently we have to reinput all of the attendance data into our own spreadsheets and formulas, but would be fantastic to have a solution that maps multiple courses together. Often in the VET sector students have their courses chosen for them and to have attendance separated by course leaves us with a big process hole that we have to fill.

bben6
Community Novice

I agree with most of the features requested; the attendance report is virtually useless due to the extremely unwieldy format, and the report access is a bit ridiculous (really? a 24-hour link to a file stored on Amazon AWS, emailed to the instructor? Just make a .csv file to be downloaded on the spot!) A much more useful report would include two sections, at the very least, maybe even three:

-A per-day attendance summary for each student, sorted by student in a table. 

-An overall per-student summary of the total number of absences, latenesses, etc. (sorted by student)

   -This one is especially needed, as sometimes instructors just need to report these totals per-student to their departments. It would be especially useful if class periods after a student has dropped are no longer included in these totals.

-A per-day attendance summary of the number of people present/absent/late, sorted by date

jblumberg
Community Contributor

I agree a simplified report would be better for instructors.

For admins I like the report format (a simple pivot table makes the data super useable).  The problem is there should be a programmatic way to get the sub-account level reports since this would allow us to feed it into a student analytics systems to identify students at risk.

hardym1
Community Novice

I've been asked to move an earlier suggestion to this thread. I would like to see a "left early" option added to attendance in addition to the "present", "tardy", "absent" and "not marked" options. It would be nice to document when students leave early.

kbink
Community Contributor

Sorry this has gotten too long to read through, but another feature I need is that if the section has attendance taken, that attendance should also show on the all sections view.

ametcal
Community Novice

When changing the section on Roll Call, it also changes the Date and I have to remember to fix this every time (this is a big inconvenience when I'm behind and going back to edit past dates). Why doesn't it default to just changing one value (section or date) at a time?

 

Also, why can't we view both sections of a linked course at the same time like we can for Grades?

 

Note:  There are many other changes I would make to Roll Call too; for now, this suggestion is based on my rather primitive use of the tool.  A complete overhaul like others have suggested would be welcome.

caryn
Community Member

It would at least be helpful for the instructor to be able to see the report that the students see. The student facing report is actually quite robust and helpful - it's just hidden from instructors. 

https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10697-4212643081 

fodegbami
Instructure
Instructure

 @fkhanzada ‌, sharing this discussion with you as you recently asked about the attendance tool. Please reach out to me if you have any questions.