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.

[ChandlWM]

My district doesn't make attendance available in canvas.  It sure would be nice if they did.

[kjohnson10]

All I have now is : present, late, absent

I would like another button for present via Zoom or other Online tech.

If the indicator could be blue, that would be great.

[alm151]

Add comments for attendance such as stating the reason the student was Excused, sports, medical etc... If there is a chronic tardy student being able to write down the time to justify counting absent, documentation trails etc...

[alm151]

Also to indicate they are online versus in person.

[peter_concannon]

I spent hours a couple of years ago downloading and then reorganizing attendance information in Excel so I could see specific dates for each student's attendance. In short, I built an attendance grid, the same as instructors have been using for decades, at least. 

This sort of display should be incorporated directly in Canvas. Failing that, the download to Excel should at least organize so we have student names in the left column, with columns proceeding to the right that list class dates. Simple and easy, without having to battle Excel. 

If I chose to reprocess this information in Excel myself, as I did a couple of years ago, I would have to re-teach myself how to do it, a bad use of my time.  This is a fundamental and obvious feature.

[mieke_hoing]

As mentioned earlier by @ecolbeck and others, there should be a way to take attendance for several lectures of the same course in one day. In our case AM and PM would do, but I'm sure there are more complicated cases than ours.

[cvalle]

Many schools require us to indicate the last day of attendance if a student fails the class. Right now I have to go to the Attendance page and manually check each day for each student to determine the last day of attendance. If this could be automated that would be fantastic.

[WendySchindler]

Please give to the option to add the Test Student to Roll Call Attendance.

I use the Student View to walk my students through all of the features of Canvas. I would like to be able to show them what the Roll Call Attendance page looks like as well. 

Additionally, this would help newer instructors (or instructors new to using Canvas) who are using the Student View to learn what Canvas looks like from a student's point of view.

[Stef_retired]

Comments from Instructure

For your information, a new Canvas Attendance tool has been developed in New Analytics. New Analytics includes an Attendance tab, which updates according to criteria set at the account level. This change allows criteria to update attendance information for individual courses and remove manual attendance tracking. 

For more information, please read through  Canvas Release Notes (2021-08-21).

[Stef_retired]

Comments from Instructure

You'll find more information about the new Canvas Attendance tool in New Analytics at  Canvas Release: New Analytics - Attendance Report.

[jamie_kootz]

The roll call attendance feature should be defaulted to "No grade" or at least let admins change the default for their University.

[domenicadevine]

This conversation started in 2015. When will we see some changes. I have 2 sections that meet in one room. I cannot get a decent attendance since they are separated by section in the map. Can we get this fixed? particularly difficult with COVID since i can't recognize anyone. 

[SMichlin]

I am an adjunct instructor.  Every semester, I have students who wish to be called by a different name (or nickname) than what is on their registration/CANVAS roster.  Perhaps some are transitioning and wish to be called a different name, and calling them by their registered name is awkward, or worse, insulting.  Having student names editable on the attendance page would allow instructors to make these changes. Having this limited to the attendance feature would not change their names tied to course registrations, etc.  The instructor would then have a reminder of the preferred name for the student when attendance is taken each day.  The student ID # would still match the student's attendance to the rest of their CANVAS course.

[VivekVirani]

When students view their Roll Call Attendance on Canvas, they can easily see the dates they were marked present, absent, or late. However, Instructors cannot see this view for each student unless they run an attendance report which sends an excel file to their email. This is a very unwieldy process - especially for large classes! Why not make it so Instructors can simply see the same attendance history screen that students already have? This seems like such a common-sense solution to allow instructors to quickly take a look at attendance for each student without running off dozens of excel reports!

[cssmit]

I call roll using the roll call Attendance feature. However, this feature just shows student names from SIS and does not allow them to be edited. This is a problem, as many students would like to be called differently from their SIS names: perhaps they have a nickname, an American name, or they are transitioning and adopting a new name.

Attendance should allow instructors to edit the name that appears on the roll call, or at least add a new field for "nickname" that appears under the SIS name in the roll.

[a-roberrol]

I am in agreement on many of the comments above. The pandemic and hybrid teaching has put new demands on attendance taking; however, Roll Call is primary input-based with very little in terms of output. The output I would recommend is a report that looks and acts like the Quiz Statistics report. 

- The top of the report is a line graph showing all four attendance groups (present, absent, tardy, null) class by class through the term with float over alt tags containing data info

- Below are sections, one per course, with two pie charts - one all four attendance groups (present, absent, tardy, null) with float over alt tags containing data info - another for any badges selected with float over alt tags containing names

- also include all of badges in the export report

[mahola]

It is rare, but sometimes two students with identical names (and no picture in profile) enroll in the same course.  Roll Call attendance has no way for the teacher to distinguish these users.  Can we look into adding the SIS ID, or maybe at least pronouns for roll call attendance?

[YolandaCerezo]

En la asistencia dentro de escenarios híbridos, se trabaja con subgrupos de alumnos que a unas clases no tienen que asistir y otras si, poder gestionar en asistencia esto sería de gran ayuda al profesor.

Translation from Google Translate:

In attendance within hybrid scenarios, we work with subgroups of students who do not have to attend some classes and others do, being able to manage in attendance this would be of great help to the teacher.

[bmilford]

It would be helpful to have more options in the Attendance Roster as that is often tied to a Participation and Attendance rubric whereby points could be automatically calculated (or more easily calculated) in the Gradebook.  I could imagine the options being:

Unexcused - 0%

Excused - 80% (variable/or whatever you assign for that designation)

Partial - 90%

Partial - 80%

Partial - 70%

Etc. all the way down to 10%

or .... 

Partial:  ____  (and we are able to assign the % in there individually)

With more online classes - the way students come in and out (for a variety of reasons) means we need to have more flexibility in grading and this would be a convenient and helpful place to put that.

Thank you,

Bill Milford

bmilford@thomasu.edu