Make Attendance Visible to Students

[judyk]

  This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

I would like for the attendance to be visible to the students in their grades. If students are being graded on attendance, I believe it is important that we as instructors are able to effectively communicate this to the students.

  Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2016-09-17)

This feature release has been delayed and will not be available in production on September 17. An updated release date will be made available soon.

[c_larson]

I love Canvas, but this is far and away my biggest complaint. The way it's currently set up makes no sense to me, and I simply unpublish the Roll Call Attendance assignment associated with attendance because it doesn't help students. In my class, attendance isn't tied to a grade (and I firmly believe that it shouldn't be). However, I do need to impress upon students that their attendance is important, so my policy is that after four absences in a semester, they fail the course (BTW, this is a policy used by several, if not most, of the other instructors at my institution). As such, I need students to be able to see how many times they've been absent, not a running percentage of the classes they've missed. IMO, this should be at the top of the list of new features to be added. Canvas is such a great tool (particularly compared with what I have to use at other institutions I teach at), and this would be the cherry on top. Thanks!

[jbrady2]

 @c_larson ​ Our school also needs a means to inform students of their absences. Many of the clusters at our institution, especially those who instruct remedial courses have also set a very strict absence policy and need some way to provide students with an early warning system to help prevent the students from failing the course due to excessive absences. Unfortunately, the current attendance options do not work as they either do not display the number of absences to the students or they only work in a weighted gradebook and many of our instructors use a point-based system of grading. I believe the coding is already in place, in that Canvas already has a Notes column in the gradebook. If they could simply reproduce this feature with an option for the instructor to show/hide in the student gradebook, so that only those instructors who want/need to use it can and others can turn/leave it off. Then perhaps also allow it to be renamed by the instructor, so that it might be used for multiple purposes, this should solve the issue.

[ahampto2]

I receive a lot of emails from students wanting to know how many absences/tardies they have accumulated. It would save so much time and hassle if students could see their attendance reports automatically!

[sskripak]

I keep getting email updates on this issue and nothing has changed. Who is in charge of this decision? And why keep emailing when there is no movement on a decision?

[kona]

 @sskripak ​, you are getting email updates because other Canvas users are posting comments to this feature idea and why they would like it implemented. As for who is in charge of the decision, that would ultimately be Instructure, but there was a formal statement about this feature idea from an Instructure employee (made in November) that stated, "This isn't currently planned to be worked on in the next 6 months, but we will be looking into short term and long term solutions for attendance that do a much better job of communicating attendance to student and Instructors." For more information about Attendance and Instructure's response about Attendance, I recommend checking out their official statement on this feature idea -

[sskripak]

Thanks, Kora. That's very helpful info. I will wait until the 6 months has expired. At that point, I hope for a different decision and will express that opinion to our Canvas support office.

[kona]

Ditto! Attendance is definitely a pressure point for us and has been since we switched to Canvas in 2012!

[tina_tom]

I agree with everyone else, I was really excited when I discovered this item since it was like class dojo in assisting with documentation. I thought observers (parents) and students would have access, but they don't which is disappointing, I wanted to share this with everyone, now I can't! I hope they make attendance visible to students and observers soon.

[schmidt_442]

Teaching dance classes in college, attendance is a very important part of the grade - both for instructor to track absences and tardies which affect the Attendance and total grade, and for student to see how they were marked each day. Hard to get a grade for dancing if you are not there! Here is an example of our syllabus that refers to attendance:

    "Students may miss 10% of the classes (three total for classes meeting twice weekly. Absence from more than 10% of classes will affect the final grade by lowering it five points for each additional absence.  These absences include excused (e.g. illness) and unexcused (e.g. not in the mood) absences.  Make-up classes are not allowed. Three tardies equals one absence."

[mbs12]

My colleagues and I consider this an urgent need -- students need to be able to see which classes they missed in order to complete make up work and also double check that they weren't incorrectly marked absent on a day they were present (yes, instructor error happens). Please make attendance visible to students!!