Kitchen Sink: Attendance/Roll Call

So far, our Faculty has had great things to say about the Roll-Call Attendance feature.   When we used Angel, we didn’t have anything even remotely similar, so having a tool incorporated into Canvas makes it a lot easier (and even fun!) to keep track of  attendance during the semester.

We are, however, now receiving requests from Instructors who would like a few more detailed options to be available within the Roll-Call feature.  Here are a few of the suggested improvements:

1. Add the ability to change the point value of an “absence” to make it so that if a student misses one class, this will count more towards their final grade.

2. Add the ability to give students “excused” absences.

3. Change the “exported report” feature so that it is shown in a grade-book format.  It should include the students’ names, columns for each day, the attendance data, and the total average attendance score.  It would also be helpful if the badges and any notes the Instructor makes during the term, show up on the report.   We have suggested to our Instructors that they use badges (to account for “excused” absences or any other notes they make during the semester), and the fact that badges don’t show in the exported report is frustrating.

4. Incorporate the ability to record “Participation” as part of the students grade.  Many of our Instructors have a category for “Attendance and Participation” so at the end of the semester,  they have to manually enter “Participation” separately for each student.