Tracking Attendance
You track each student’s attendance using the Attendance feature. This chapter describes how to configure and use this feature.
The Attendance feature is used to track students’ attendance. Data from the feature is automatically imported into the Gradebook feature, where you can use it to help determine students’ midterm and final grades, if desired.
If you want attendance to affect students’ midterm and final grades, you will make that configuration within the Gradebook feature. Although that setup is not done here in the Attendance feature, this section provides a brief overview of the Gradebook options, since it may be useful to understand them before setting up your Attendance feature.
Give Attendance a Value
You can configure your system so that attendance is equal to a specific value that will be used to determine the student’s midterm and final grades. Depending on how you set up your Gradebook, this value could be a point value or a percentage of the total grade. With this system, you can penalize students for tardiness and unexcused absences.
Triggering Automatic Failure
In addition to—or instead of—the options described in Giving Attendance a Value, you can set up your Gradebook so that students automatically fail the course after a certain number of unexcused absences. In this scenario, it doesn’t matter how well the students do on any of their coursework. It also doesn’t matter whether you set up attendance to have a relatively small value in relation to coursework (or any value). If students reach the limit of unexcused absences, they fail.
Student attendance records are organized by session. A session is any scheduled meeting of the class. The Attendance feature automatically includes a session for each regular class meeting (as determined by the schedule for the course section), and you can also manually add sessions. For example, you might manually add a session if you schedule a field trip or a review meeting outside the regular schedule.
If you have set up the course section so that attendance affects grades, note that by default, the credit that a student gets for attending a session is proportional to the duration of the session. However, you can manually increase a session’s value by increasing the minutes that it is worth, without changing the scheduled start and end times.
For example, suppose your class meets once a week for an hour, and you have also scheduled a one-hour field trip. If you want the field trip to count for three times the regular class meeting, you can specify in the Attendance feature that it is worth 360 minutes, even if it only is scheduled for one hour.
The initial view of the Attendance feature includes the following tools:
A calendar, which you can use to locate existing sessions or create new ones.
Details on the most recent session, with each student’s record for that session. If you have not yet recorded attendance for that session, the system displays drop-down boxes that you can use to mark students present, absent, and so forth.
Links to screens for adding and managing sessions.
A link for displaying settings for the feature instance.
A link to a tool for exporting attendance data to Microsoft Excel.
When a student displays the Attendance feature, it shows details about that student’s own attendance. Specifically, the system displays a short summary and a detailed list of the student’s attendance history.
If you are using the default template for course contexts, the Attendance page is read-only. This means you cannot remove the Attendance feature, nor can you add additional features to the page.
Navigate to the Attendance Feature
This procedure explains how to display the Attendance feature. These steps assume that your school uses the default template for course contexts. If your school has customized the template, your Attendance feature might be located elsewhere.
Navigate to the appropriate course context.
In the left pane, click Attendance.
The portal displays the Attendance page, which hosts the Attendance feature.
