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.

[walter_yarbroug]

Just discovered this thread today and registered solely to upvote based on attendance difficulties at our institution.

Please address these, particularly excused absences.

[kbink]

Not sure it will help, but we've been struggling too.  This is a link to our attendance document with everything we have worked out so far about using and maintaining the attendance tool in our large courses.

[norchard]

It would be very useful to allow a class to happen at multiple times during a day and individual attendance information to be recorded. E.g. gcse English group a 09:30-11:00 and then 15:00-16:00

[matt13]

Most, if not all, the issue discussed in this thread can be accomplished in Qwickly Attendance, and we utilize a continuous development cycle on the product so new features are always being released. For example, we released an update last week that provides a new look at a summary of attendance statuses by students, to compliment our full record view.  See below for an example.

We always offer free pilot periods as well, to make sure our tool is a fit for your school, so if Spring is the right time to try things out, be sure to let us know!

I encourage any of you that may be attendance CanvasCon in Austin to attend our session on Friday Nov 30 at 11:55am on Qwickly Attendance to see a live demo.  We hope to see you there!

[heatherlbrown77]

I'm happy to see this on here. It would be more useful if the reports contained the number of absences/present/late and the percentage. So, in other words, when you click on the students name a pop-up currently comes up which displays each students info - that is the info that needs to be on the report as well as a summary of the class as a whole.

[rudeb]

This issue has been around for about 3 years now. I've skimmed through the 8 pages of history and the last entry by a employee with a red panda by their name, (page 5 for those playing along at home) was over a year and a half ago. That post did not have any real information, it was just a canned response telling people to create polls/ideas for features they wanted and to make sure they vote to get ideas noticed. There are 14 other polls/ideas ahead of this one that have more votes (adding perspective for popularity of this idea versus others).

I think just adding the "excused" button would help to alleviate a lot of the tension in this thread. I know there is never an "easy fix" when it comes to coding new feature into an existing platform. I am sure that it would not be an easy one hour project to put in an "excused" button. However, this was requested over 3 years ago. Even if someone worked on this for 10 minutes a WEEK that equals almost 8 hours of time to create something and put on beta for testing. Also, it would keep institutions from looking outside of Canvas to find solutions for their problems. No one wants to pay for Canvas and then have to purchase LTI's for basic features that are there, but not fleshed out enough to really use. I mean, all it takes is a new LMS that is promising these things to catch a wandering eye, ask anyone why they transferred from their old LMS.

I don't mean for this to come off as a rant. I am quiet happy with Canvas and the service we have had. It has been super easy to use and get configured. The community rocks. The search-ability for questions is fantastic. I am quiet happy with Canvas. However, I do not think that there is anything wrong with open discussion and the want for new things or additions. I also believe that Canvas can and should say "No", there has to be a give and take. I know this might be a dead thread but I wanted to get my thoughts out there. Any who, this is just a string of thoughts and words from a random stranger on the internet.

[tgideons]

I think a rant is deserved at this point. Three years later and Roll Call Attendance is still a mess. 

[akerr1]

Yes! Yes to ALL of the points in the "Attendance Overhaul" request, and yes to all of these individual comments in support. I just tried Roll Call for the first time (January 2019), and I was horrified by how clunky it was. I struggled through the interface, not believing it could really be that bad, and then gave up in frustration after wasting an entire afternoon. (I am now just recording attendance in a shared Google Sheet instead.)

Here's what I wrote to my campus Canvas liason. (I also suggested buying a paid plug-in as an alternative, "aPlus+ Attendance," But he said our campus didn't have the budget for that, unfortunately.)

- - - - - -
I hadn't tried using the "Roll Call" tool before. Now, after getting familiar with it, I hate it. Here's why:

(1) Entering the attendance scores is really awkward. Roll Call insists on showing my two sections separately, even though everyone attends lecture together. When I switch from one section to the other, the date for which I'm recording data reverts to today's date. If I don't notice and just keep entering data, there's no way to change the date on the data I entered; I  have to delete it all and start over again. Furthermore, I have to flip through every single day in the calendar; I can't choose to just display our MW meeting days.

(2) On Canvas, the students cannot view their day-by-day attendance. They only get to see their OVERALL attendance score, not by date. And they can only see their tallies in the three default categories: Present, Absent, and Late. Any custom categories (e.g., "Excused Absence" don't show up in student view, and it's not clear to even to me how custom categories get counted.

(3) The auto-generated "Attendance Report" spreadsheet is an unusable mess. Instead of having students as the rows and dates as the columns (or vice versa), the report runs on in one extremely long column, listing the same names over and over again. Any students with a status of "Unmarked" (my only option to record excused absences) ended up getting lumped at the end of the spreadsheet, totally out of date order. Trying to integrate this into a grade spreadsheet would be a nightmare.

[akerr1]

Totally agree! I have a MW class, and it is infuriating to have to flip through the entire week one day at a time.

[matt13]

Hi Amber - I'm the co-founder of Qwickly and we provide an extremely popular and affordable attendance solution called Qwickly Attendance that you may want to check out.  If you're intersted in what it has to offered, check out our webinars at https://www.goqwickly.com/attendance/#webinars

You'll find that the items you're citing, and many more are solved with Qwickly Attendance.  We also offer free semester-long pilots to schools to make sure the tools is a good fit.

Have a great day!

[bdaniel]

For Higher Ed: When faculty cross-list one or more sections into a parent course, Roll Call does not currently allow them to create one big seating chart for all sections.  This feature would help faculty who have cross-listed courses that meet at the same time.  The current configuration requires that they use a separate seating chart for each section. Thank you.

[mgarcia7]

I would also love to see an option to ignore the ___ lowest attendance scores or allow ____ of absences without harming the grade. I give 2 freebies and cannot use this tool as there is no way to say that the first two absences don't count against the grade.

[debbie_ellis]

This is a fantastic feature improvement that is exactly what we need at my college. We are getting ready to move from Blackboard to Canvas, and we had a great third-party building block that did some of the things Kona requested. Key for us is that students be able to see their attendance so that they can monitor how many cuts they have for the class.

Another thing we are able to do is allow for tracking attendance by use of the students' fobs. Large classrooms have a fob reader at the entrance, and students use their fobs to sign in for class. If there could be a way to port that information into Canvas, that would be great.

[matt13]

Hi Debbie - you may want to check out Qwickly Attendance which has been wildly popular in Blackboard and now available for Canvas. It also allows students to scan cards or fobs to check into class.

You can see it in action at https://www.goqwickly.com/attendance (If you go to the choose your LMS and click Canvas you'll see all the features and screenshots specifically for Canvas).

[ziamandc]

Not letting me VOTE UP, or I already VOTED UP.  This needs to be fixed immediately.  We have state reporting requirements to comply with, and the current lumpy (Blackboard-like) system just does not cut it.  If you are working with Excel underneath, this should be an easy fix.

VOTING UP

VOTING UP

VOTING UP.

(What?  I come from an area that loved allowing voters to hit the urns multiple times!)

[brett2]

Hi!

This is Brett Sellars checking in again from aPlus+ Attendance. Other than seating plans, we cover almost every requirement in this thread with our Canvas LTI.

Also, we have some popular new features to announce that may address some of the more recent requests.

-We now support clock hour attendance for courses that require minimum hours/minutes for regulatory purposes. Instructors can enter arrival and departure time adjustments by student. Alternatively, use our stand alone WiFi scanners, or usb scanners, to record arrival and departure time. All reportable using our extensive centralized administrator backend.

-The Teams module now available. Where you can define any group of students (athletic teams, fields trip groups, or any other groups). These groups can then have advance absences set, which will update their attendance in advance across all of the students classes and notify all affected instructors, in just a few clicks. This has been very popular for our customers who have athletic programs.

-Calculation enhancements to allow absences to date, to be shown as a percentage of the total number of course sessions (both past and future).

Please reach out to me through our website if you would like to see a demo or setup a pilot!

Thanks,

Brett

aPlus+ Attendance Canvas LTI

[dlgray1]

I like the ideas presented.  I would also like to be able to view all the students' attendance in one view, e.g., as a table.  I know it can be exported to Excel, but as noted, that is a messy file and not usable.  Thanks.

[matt13]

Hi Dan - take a look at Qwickly Attendance, it has the ability to see student totals in a table by individual records or you can instantly collapse the view to see totals each attendance status for every student.

[kmcgrath]

Hi, Matt - This looks like a great tool. Am I understanding correctly that it has to be purchased at the institution level? Thanks!

Kimzey

[matt13]

Hi Kimzey - yes, typically speaking we do usually license to an entire institution. However, we have also been able to work with department/school at times as well.  And we always provide trial licenses to make sure the tool fits your needs.  If you're interested as an individual, we may be able to accommodate you as well; I just need to check with out technical team about how we can do individual courses!   If you'd like, please feel free to send me an email at matt@goqwickly.com and I'd be happy to worth with you to set up either a quick demo or trial.

Matt