Attendance Overhaul

[kona]

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.

[ddavis4]

I would like to have the ability to mark attendance as usual. But I would like it to not automatically create a 100 point column in the grade book. I would like the ability to deduct points from the overall score when a student has more than the allowed and stated number of unexcused absences from the syllabus.

[MubarakParambil]

In attendance sheet, show the number of students marked present, absent and unmarked. Verifying it becomes harder for large number of students because you have to manually count.

[VidishaPriyanka]

Adding a comments area where we take attendance, even if it is a short text input box, will allow the instructor to add comments in case the student wants to be addressed by a different name or requires additional assistance of some kind. It would also be a good place to add if the student was absent due to a valid reason and therefore should be given a pass.

If this can be further developed then students can attach their comments about why they were absent, etc. But even if there is a comments area for instructors that would be really helpful.

[KatrinaK]

Add a comments section to Attendance. It is useful to know why a student missed.

[dkpst5]

The existing Canvas Roll Call Attendance tool's CSV export only includes the Canvas internal ID and not the student SIS ID. This compounds the other limitations of the tool. Please revise this report to include the SIS ID.

[BenJam1n]

I had someone ask me how they show someone excused in attendance today.  I had to look it up, and I suppose I and others will have to do the same. It would be nice if unmarked could share a label with excused or have another button present for this option.  It is already an option for the grade book. 

[lelandkrum]

Please provide a way to copy the seating chart from one day forward to all remaining class periods.

Thank you

[alm151]

In the attendance tool, instead of scrolling through to check individual student's attendance, I just click on the student's name to view a full summary, but if I want to view others I have to back out and go back to the main page. I would like to suggest an arrow key to switch from student to student like the pages tool and the arrows to switch from page to page.

[sspeer]

I'd like to request that the attendance tool include a way to indicate where the front of the room/where the instructor's work station is on the seating chart. Our campus is using the Canvas attendance tool to help our COVID 19 contact tracers identify students and instructors who need to be communicated with when a positive case is reported. Each instructor appears to orient the seating chart a bit differently so a quick way to help the contact tracers by knowing where the instructor spends most of the class will help them know when to include the instructor in the communication. 

I can see this being helpful additionally as a time saver should another instructor need to fill in for a class. 

[KeishaTurner]

It would be so helpful to be able to check an individual students' attendance at each class for the entire quarter. So far, I can only see their attendance percentage overall or on any one day at a time.  On Blackboard I was able to see a single student's weekly attendance for the whole quarter. 

[laura_bishop]

At the top level, please add an option that will allow me to mark a student's absence as an "excused absence." I have students who have athletic events (in the past), have interviews, or other other valid academic reasons to miss a class session or are ill. 

I would like to be able to scan down the list of names to see who has simply missed the class and who had an excused absence to miss the class. I usually make up the work with those who had an excused absence and need to be able to know that they missed the session for an approved reason. Right now there are only four options at the top level (present, absent, late or unmarked).

Don't suggest using a "badge" to add the reason for the absence. I don't want to have to go down a level to see whether the absence was excused or whether it simply was an absence.

Please add a choice for excused absence as well as absent at the top level.

Thank you.

Laura Bishop

[bethanydavidso1]

Please add an option for an excused absence.  The lack of an excused option has always been an issue given student-athletes.  However, particularly now, with students needing to miss class due to being quarantined or isolated, it is an issue for one or more students every class meeting.  

Thank you, 

Bethany Davidson

[ST08]

As a follow up to:

• Allow for additional states other than present, late, absent - ex: excused

It would be nice to add our own comments for those additional states. I can see using this 2 ways - noting why the student is absent or excused. Also so I can note other things about attendance, such as behavior, or on remote classes or if the camera is on or off.

[fhoulihan]

I notice in Attendance that they have an entry for EVERY DAY. It would be more useful if you could choose only the days the class meets. Also it would be nice if it sent an email to someone absent to remind them about the class.  Qwickly Attendance does both but is not an option as a tool for this Canvas at this school.

[KristinL]

Hi @fhoulihan -

Both of these are good ideas to share with the Community! If you would, please edit this post so that it only includes one of the requests and create a new one for the other. By giving each idea its own thread, it allows other Community Members to provide their feedback in a more direct way.

Thank you!

[MichalR]

Please add an option to see the whole attendance at once within the canvas interface without downloading an Attendance roll.

[CarmenJimenez22]

Please add excused to the choices in the attendance function.  And let instructors be able to send messages from that page.

[AdrianT]

Use case issue: When viewing Class List standard view in Roll Call attendance tool in Canvas, there is no indication that a badge has been assigned to a given student. The presence or absence of any badges is only evident when clicking on the "more" tab at the student's name. When marking a student in advance that they will be excused from class on that date, current practice is to maintain "Unmarked" status, and assign an "Excused" badge to the student for that day. When the day for the class arrives, and roll call is taken, lack of visibility of the badge in class list view leads to the student being mistakenly marked as "Absent", and requiring remedial action to correct afterward.

Current work-around is to assign the badge and mark the student "Late", while adding the "Excused" badge. The Late status acts as a prompt to then change it back to "Unmarked" when taking actual roll call.

Either of the two following ideas might mitigate this.

Idea 1. Create an additional status for "Excused", and not need a badge so dedicated.

Idea 2. Add functionality in the Class List view of roll call to indicate the presence of any assigned badges for a student on a given day. An example of such functionality might be to display alongside each student's name a count of badges, similar to app indications of the number of waiting notifications.

[AnthonyLarson]

Issue:
Frequently our teachers take attendance on the wrong date, due to some browser caching issues.

Idea:
It would be helpful if there could be an alert / notification that the attendance date is set to a day other than the current day.