How do I encourage and monitor attendance?

Dear Aggie,

Our department has an attendance policy, and I am expected to take and grade attendance. I have a large class, and am not really sure how to manage taking attendance. On top of that, not every student seems to prioritize attendance, so it feels a little like herding cats. Do you have any suggestions?

~Herding Cats

Dear Herding,

Establishing policies for attendance and participation in your syllabus, and being transparent about them from Day 1 will really help you, even with the most recalcitrant of cats.

The first thing you’ll need to decide is the goal. Are you interested in attendance (students minimally showing up), or participation (students doing something in the class)? Here are some questions for you to consider:

• What is it that you are doing that would make attendance and/or participation really meaningful to students? What do they get that they can’t get from just watching a video or recording of a lecture?
• What opportunities are you providing for interaction? Can your students connect with their peers in breakout rooms or in a discussion? Are they interacting with the material through polling or clicker questions? Are they applying the material to “real world” situations through case studies? Are they collaborating in an in-person classroom?
• How does attendance/participation help ensure that students can successfully meet the course objectives? Does what they do in class directly and obviously contribute to their success in the course?

Then you have to figure out how to record attendance and/or participation.

Canvas' New Analytics Tools

If you require some regular activity though Canvas (e.g. in an online, blended or hybrid course), you can use the “students” and “weekly online activity” analytics tools in Canvas to monitor attendance and participation. To get to these tools, click on the “New Analytics” link on the right side of your homepage.

A. New Analytics: Students

You can use the “Students” tab to get a list of course students with their current grade, % on time submissions, date of last participation, date of their last page view, total number of page views and the number of times they have participated. A student is considered to have participated when they have submitted a quiz or assignment, posted a new comment to a discussion or an announcement, created a page, or started taking a quiz. This list is sortable, searchable, and filterable (by student) and can be downloaded as a csv.

A complete list of possible “participations” can be found here: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/New-Analytics-Users/Analytics-Page-Views-and-Participations/ta-p/262828.

Note that NMSU may not use all of the activities listed as “participations”. If you need to be absolutely certain, please check in with Academic Technology at their Open Lab.

B. New Analytics: Weekly Online Activity

You can use the weekly online activity tab to generate graphs of average weekly page views and average weekly participation, by course and by student. This can also be downloaded as a csv file.

Attendance in Synchronous Zoom Sessions

If you have synchronous Zoom sessions set up through the Canvas course, you can go back to the Zoom link in your Canvas course, click on the previous meetings tab, then the “Report” link for any given meeting to get a report of who logged into that session and for how long.

Participation by Polling

If you have in-person or synchronous components, you can use a cloud-based polling system (e.g. iClicker Cloud). You can choose settings to reward both accuracy (e.g. a full point for correctly answering a question) and participation (e.g. half a point for answering a question incorrectly). If a student does not answer a question, you can assign 0 points, to help encourage participation.

If you have required synchronous Zoom sessions scheduled through Zoom in Canvas, you can use Zoom polls in your Zoom sessions. If you go to the Zoom link (left toolbar), then click on the “Previous Meetings” tab, you will get a list of previous meetings. You can click on the “Report” link for any meeting to get the meeting report (that records who was present and for how long), and/or the poll report for that meeting. 

Final Thoughts

While the pandemic is "easing", we need to be mindful of the fact that students may still need to miss class due to COVID-19, as well as the many other things that come up for all of us. Even in the absence of a pandemic, students have busy lives and stuff happens that prevents them from coming to class, despite their desire to prioritize attendance and participation. Building in some flexibility and/or secondary alternatives to your attendance and participation policies will make life easier for you and your students. We can talk more about this in another post.

NMSU has some great information about attendance and attendance policies at: https://provost.nmsu.edu/faculty-and-staff-resources/syllabus/AbsenceResources091321.pdf

I hope this makes you feel less like a cat herder and more like a happy camper with engaged and participatory students.

~Aggie