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
Kelly1313
Community Member

(1) Allow for downloading Attendance report (just like Grades are downloaded, rather than it being sent via email.

(2) Allow instructor to unhide Attendance so that each student can see the dates they are marked present/late/absent. This feature may already be available but if it is I don't know where to tell the students to look for it.

jozua
Community Explorer

We're having some issues with Roll Call Attendance:

1) Cannot take attendance more than once on the same day for the same course

2) If a course contains multiple sections with an overlap in students, it can really mess up roll call attendance

 

Suggestion: 

Display roll call attendance data in the same way as you can with Online Attendance. (Little grid with icons for each day, or better still, the option to make the grid be for every week for courses that have weekly classes.(

schexnayderk
Community Participant

Here to second... third... 1 billionth "Excused" absences.  It's important for my military servicemembers who I have to mark "not present" but are not to lose points for absences. 

My rolls can be required for state's evidence in court cases, so they have to be accurate.

Thanks, 

Kathleen Schexnayder

WandaAJohnson
Community Member

Please provide a prompt/field for "Excused Absences," and allow us to provide the reason for the absence once we click on it. This would help us avoid trying to keep separate lists on student absences.

Thanks,

Wanda Johnson Stokes

 
MiguelMontanez
Community Explorer

I would like to have the ability to configure "the week" according to the meeting days. Typical sessions meet on either Mon/Wed/Fri or Tues/Thurs. I would like to have the option to configure the "week" so that when I access the attendance roll, it only shows the meeting days for that particular class/section. Thank you for your consideration.

 

schexnayderk
Community Participant

I would also like to suggest that there be a way to "drop the lowest" with rollcall attendance like one can do with grades. 

I teach college students, and I try to be inclusive by saying they can miss (so many) classes--no questions asked.  It helps people who can't afford to go to the doctor, or for people who just have minor illnesses or issues which shouldn't require one to go to a doctor (which can be impossible to get on short notice and prohibitively expensive even with insurance). 

janetello
Community Member

Attendance - indicate it in missed classes (or indicate both attended and missed days), not in percentage, so that students know EXACTLY how many classes they missed.

 

This is very important and would save instructors and GAs so much time tracking this and answering students' emails

janetello
Community Member

I reported today that we need this option because sometimes people let us know that they are going to miss a future class.

Here is what I got:

"For the excused status, that is something that can be accomplished simply by leaving the day unmarked for the student in question."

Well, this is not helpful when you need to indicate excused absence for a future date.

So, this option should be added.

dps11
Community Novice

Please number the students 

man20
Community Explorer

When you click on a the More button for a student's attendance, it would be really helpful if it listed the first day of attendance and last day of attendance in their summary.  Also, I would like to be able to write a comment for their attendance status each day. 

StephanieBusbea
Community Novice

Please add a space for us to add a comment for excused absences.  For example, football team trip or Covid.  It makes a difference in how the student is allowed to make up work in my class.  

mirzadegan
Community Member

Apologies if this comment has already been added (couldn't find it)... Additional suggestions:

- Add the Test Student to Roll Call Attendance so that instructors can more easily see what students are seeing on their end;

- Add the ability to set automated idiosyncratic grading rules based on attendance (e.g., if attended 50% or more days, student receives 5 points extra credit; if attended 75% or more, 10 points extra credit);

- Separate student first and last name into different columns in the downloadable attendance report.

EmilyPrevost
Community Member

We absolutely need an attendance overhaul with useful reporting functionality that shows a total number of absences rather than a separate entry for each one and a last date of attendance feature.

aaron_bahmer
Community Contributor

Is ther a timeline for implementation of any of this?

Estefania
Community Explorer

An addition to this: Allow to show more than 50 students in the seating chart.

The grid has space for more, but somehow after 50 student some of them will jump to a second page and there does not seem to be any real rhyme or reason to how this happens, which makes it very confusing. 

dkpst5
Community Participant

The number of  times per semester I get requests for how to get data out of Attendance... There's no way to get "badge" information out, so I always encourage everyone not to use it. The CSV report generation is hard to get and read; it should probably be handled in-browser, with an optional CSV export.

schexnayderk
Community Participant

It's been nearly 10 years after the initial request (and who knows how long prior, that we've all been asking for some of the same things before the OP author packaged it in the Attendance Overhaul) and we're all still here waiting. 

JACOBSEN_C
Community Contributor

@schexnayderk yes, 100%

 

Tstay
Community Novice

Wow, it's surprising that this has been open since early 2015 (and as @schexnayderk said, most likely the same feature requests have been around longer).  Maybe someone has already said this in the 358 previous comments, but I'd just like a way to be able to see a summary of badges (specifically for excused absences).  It's ridiculous to manually click on every student's daily attendance if you need to go back and check which ones were university approved absences.  I guess I'll stop using badges and find a different system, since from past history it looks like they're not going to be improved, ever.

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.