Track attendance with Attendance in D2L Brightspace

Overview

The Attendance tool enables instructors to create registers that track attendance for activities within your course. Instructors can track attendance for any number of activities and customize your registers to suit your needs. Use the Attendance tool to create sessions to track attendance and define attendance statuses for your activities. Instructors can assign grades for user attendance, view attendance results, and track students that have poor attendance.

Note that the attendance tool is NOT integrated with the Grades tool.

Create an attendance register

Create attendance registers to track attendance for your course-based activities, such as a mandatory weekly chat session or optional discussion seminar. Sessions are the components of an attendance register that define one or more events in your register. Your collective sessions make up your register.

For example, if you want to track attendance for a weekly seminar, you would create a "Weekly Meeting" register and then add sessions for each meeting using distinguishable session names "Week 1," "Week 2," etc. Attendance data is tracked for each session and displayed on the register's Attendance data page.

1. Navigate to the Attendance tool.
2. On the Attendance Registers page, click New Register.
3. Enter a Name for your register.
4. Add one or more sessions for your register by entering a Session Name, Session Description, and select the Order for each status.
5. Click Save, and then click Close.

Set your Cause for Concern percentage

The Cause for Concern metric helps you track users that fail to meet your attendance requirements by placing the  Cause for Concern icon beside their names on the Attendance Data page.

1. Navigate to the Attendance tool.
2. On the Attendance Register page, click New Register or Edit Register from the menu of a register.
3. In the Cause for Concern field, enter a percentage that indicates your minimum attendance requirement.
4. Click Save.

Attendance schemes

Attendance schemes provide the criteria for marking attendance in a register. The attendance scheme defines the attendance statuses that you can give to students for each session. You can create more complex schemes that define more statuses such as late and authorized absent. This provides flexibility to accommodate a wide range of attendance options.

Default attendance scheme

The System Scheme is a default attendance scheme, which cannot be edited or deleted, consisting of two possible attendance statuses: present and absent.

Course attendance schemes

Course attendance schemes are created by the instructor and managed in the course. A sample course attendance scheme with four statuses is listed below.

Create an attendance scheme

1. Navigate to the Attendance tool.
2. Click Attendance Schemes in the top tool menu.
3. Click New Scheme.
4. Enter a Name for your scheme.
5. In the Attendance Statuses area, enter a Symbol, Status Full Name, Assigned % and Order for each status.
6. Click Save, and then click Close.

Entering attendance data

Manage your course attendance data from the attendance data page. From here, you can view all of the attendance results for your register, search for specific users, and access each session's attendance data page.

1. Navigate to the Attendance tool.
2. From the Attendance Registers page, select View Attendance Data from a register’s menu.
3. Enter attendance data for a session by clicking the Enter Attendance Data icon.
4. Select an attendance status for students from the Attendance Status menu, and click Save.
5. When finished, click Close.

Review attendance for sessions

1. Navigate to the Attendance tool.
2. From the Attendance Registers page, select View Attendance Data from a register’s menu.
3. This page displays data that you have collected for a register by students and sessions.

Each row displays the user, the attendance status for each session, the summary of attendance statuses, and the user’s attendance percentage for the register. If you have set a Cause for Concern threshold, any user that is below your specified percentage will have a Cause for Concern icon beside their name in the % Attendance column.

Restore a deleted attendance register with sessions

1. Navigate to the Attendance tool.
2. On the Attendance Register page, click More Actions then select View Deleted Registers.
3. Click Restore next to the register you want to restore.
4. Return to the main attendance tool page to access the restored register and its sessions.