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
kmcgrath
Community Participant

Here it is on YouTube:  User Friendly Canvas Attendance Reports - YouTube

Be sure you put it in hi-res (click the gear in the bottom right of the YouTube window.)

dschaeffer
Community Novice

Thank you for teaching an old dog a new trick. Now if we can find a way to

do excused absences and snow days or clinical hours also......

On Thu, May 28, 2020, 7:32 PM kmcgrath@glendale.edu <instructure@jiveon.com>

kwheeler2
Community Explorer

Previously, I'd used a program called TeacherApp for tracking attendance in the classroom on my iPad, and it had some nice features I wish Canvas had on the iPad, including the following:

  1. A "notes" section right by the students where you could type in notes about pronunciation, gender pronoun preferences, preferred nicknames, or just notes about where the student sat.
  2. An override photograph so you could have students take an up-to-date selfie and superimpose it over the "official" photograph of the student in the course system.

 

An editable notes section that was clearly visible beside the student's name would be a big help in learning names more rapidly. The ability to edit the photograph for that student on one's iPad would also help in cases like my school, in which the photo for a student was often based on the photo for their student ID card, and often woefully out of date.

matt13
Community Novice

Hello,

Thank you for your email. As we prepare for our yearly conference on June 11, Qwickly Seminar, I will not be monitoring email to complete work for this event. I will respond to your message as soon as possible, but it may be some time until I am able to respond. I appreciate your patience and understanding.

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Matt Hadgis

President/Co-Founder

Qwickly, Inc.

sreno
Community Explorer

We been asking for this for several years, why have a report if not everything is included in the report?

mbuchanan1
Community Member

Adjust the Roll Call Attendance Badges to be used as Reward Badges and make them visible to all on the student's profile page , e portfolio, or a specially created page for this purpose. Example: Rewards could be given for "First Post!", "Engaged", "Participating", "Active Learning", "Inquisitive", "Career Oriented", "Team-Player" "Problem-Solver", "Critical Thinker", "Math Whiz", etc.  Students can earn the awards (badges) based on teacher specifications just like it is now. Students love collecting things and showing them off and collecting certain badges could mean even greater rewards such as no homework, extra credit, free day, etc. Seems like an easy adjustment for such a huge benefit.

pragna
Community Novice

All canvas needs to do is display attendance as a table, with student names as rows and dates as columns. Each cell can be represented as P for present, A for absent and L for late. This will help us know which student is absent on which day immediately. All other tools are not really useful. 

There should also be an option to set the days on which the classes are conducted. Lets say we have classes only on Mondays and Thursdays. I should be able to set that in the beginning of the semester. So that I don't see all other days while I am marking attendance. I should have an option to add some other days if I have extra classes. 

efalconer
Community Explorer

Our ESL and ABE classes are required by funding authorities to submit student attendance hours daily for every class modality. We (and many state institutions) are currently using separate tools.  Please add the option of "Time Attended" with dropdown selections  with 15-minute increments up to 6 hours to the Roll Call Attendance feature so that it can be done within Canvas. 

lshulman
Community Participant

Liz, have you looked into the new Qwickly Attendance tool? That might have a solution for you:

It allows you to add any number of criteria for attendance. You should be able to add an option for "time attended"

Qwickly Attendance | Blackboard, Canvas and D2L Brightspace Attendance and Participation Tracking wi... 

judithortiz
Community Member

Create an option to write comments during attendance.

In my case, instead of asking for "Present", I make quastions such a "what is your favorite food", in order to know my students so I would like to write their answers.

tessaturnbull07
Community Member

I am a self-contained teacher that teaches all subjects for 3 classes. District has set up one course per subject. I had 27 courses. District has said to only cross list similar subjects. With that in mind, I have 9 courses with students enrolled in all 9. I have to go through and check attendance for each student within each course.

 

I would love the ability to check a student's attendance across all courses that I am a teacher of. 

I would also love the ability to check weekly attendance of my entire course but the other option would help me better at this point in time.

JACOBSEN_C
Community Contributor

I'm not going to into it any further than that.  We have been fighting this Roll Call app for over *5 years now* (10-15 terms).  We know there are multiple discussions and feature requests related.  Troubleshooting, describing why there are issues to faculty, apologizing for how awkward it is to faculty (something instance admin have no control over), and on, and on, and on, every term is AN ENORMOUS WASTE OF TIME, and removes faith in Canvas with people who decide whether to keep using Canvas at a school.

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Please. Create. A. Better. Attendance. Tool.

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rfw
Community Member

I can click on a date and see attendance for all students.  Why can't I click on a student and see attendance for all dates?  This should be easy to view in Canvas, not pieced together in Excel from an emailed csv report.  Viewing a student's attendance record is basic to many administrative queries and functions.

deval_popat
Community Explorer

A custom badge like "Excused for PT" with an icon and color doesn't work independently. For example, when I choose the badge it must be used with other regular badges like absent. 

Students are allowed to take TestOut at the beginning of the semester. If they score 70% and above, they do not need to participate in the class but must stay enrolled. 

For these students, I created the above badge. I would like to see that badge as a label in the attendance report .cvs. And I would like to just choose the badge alone while taking attendance. 

 

wilsong
Community Participant

I'd like to take this suggestion another level. I have a teacher who wants to use the ease of Rollcall, but not use it for attendance, but for a rolling participation score each day. Right now, with Present, Late, Absent being the only options to relate to levels of participation (say points being 2, 1, 0) are three deep. He would really like to have a range from 0 to 5 based upon participation for that day.

Allowing an interface similar to the badging options, but make it so teachers could add more options and edit the names where point values would translate to one gradebook column. The alternative right now is him going into the gradebook or Speedgrader and adding, by hand, one student at a time, the additional points earned that day for each students. Ugly. Time consuming.

He also isn't interested in having a semester's worth of No Submission assignments, one per day, per student. Again, too time-consuming.

I've searched for other apps that might integrate with Canvas to meet the needs of this teacher (and others), but so far nothing will suffice.

 

judy_seiffert
Community Participant

I support the other comments posted this year (2020) for the Attendance Tool. 

Adding the option for Districts to create attendance codes to meet state agency requirements would be helpful. There are new attendance codes for Covid-19 that are beyond the usual present, late or absent codes. Provide a pass-back for the Canvas attendance data to post to our SIS (Frontline).

Both Frontline and Instructure are under Thoma Bravo.  Perhaps this umbrella will encourage Frontline and Instructure developers to work together on SIS and LMS data synchronizations such as grade and attendance pass-back. 

 

 

way to synchronize Canvas attendance data with our SIS (Banner)

ahmiayihh
Community Novice

Add a button so when you first go to the app you can log in your attendance & make a way for us to see the days we logged in .

glennber
Community Member

As a teacher, I need to identify which students are always VIRTUAL in Roll Call. Likewise, as many schools operate in hybrid, using 2 or more cohorts for each class, it would be nice to be able to have a flag identifying that in the seating chart & attendance list as well.   

While I can create a badge for this, it is not visible in the seating chart or attendance tool.

glennber
Community Member

Our district is operating in hybrid.  In building: Mon & Tues = Cohort A;  Thurs & Fri = Cohort B. Virtual Wed.

Some students are 100% virtual, even when their cohort is in the building.

For the seating chart, I had to split it into quarters.  The Left side top is Cohort A, Left Bottom is Cohort A virtual; Right top Cohort B, right Bottom cohort B virtual.  You cannot add text to seating chart to denote these.  Nor can you easily identify which students are 100% virtual.

Naomi
Community Team
Community Team
Status changed to: Open