Attendance
About attendance
Many instructors who teach face-to-face or blended courses use attendance data as part of their students' overall grades. Also, some institutions and programs have attendance policies that require instructors to track the number of class meetings students have missed.
Instructors and institutions also use attendance data in these ways:
International students who must maintain visas may need to meet attendance requirements.
Institutions may need to prove “seat time” for federal funding or accreditation.
Many institutions and instructors use attendance as they focus on student retention.
For each class meeting, you can mark whether a student is present, late, absent, or excused. The attendance records for each student appear in a single column next to other grades. On the Attendance page, profile pictures appear so you can easily identify students.
You can use attendance as part of grade calculations just as you can for an assignment grade column.
The attendance workflow
Each time an instructor opens the Attendance tool, the system creates a new meeting. A meeting is a record of attendance for that day. Meetings are not scheduled events; they are simply instances where attendance is tracked.
For each meeting, the instructor can mark each student as Present, Late, Absent, or Excused.
Instructors can view attendance in the Meeting View or the Overall View.
The Meeting View focuses on the current session. Instructors mark attendance for each student.
The Overall View displays cumulative attendance across all meetings. This view includes course-level statistics and individual student summaries.
Instructors can choose to add attendance as a column in the gradebook. Once added:
Attendance scores are calculated based on the number of meetings and student statuses.
Excused counts as Present for scoring purposes.
The grade schema can be adjusted, but attendance cannot be added again unless deleted.