Attendance in eLearn

About the Attendance Tool

The Attendance tool enables you to create registers that track attendance within your course. You can track attendance for any number of activities or class sessions 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. You can view attendance results and track users that have poor attendance.

Note: you cannot directly link eLearn attendance registers to grades.

Use the information below to set up and take attendance using the attendance tool in eLearn.

Access the Attendance Tool

From the Course Tools menu, click "Attendance" as shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1. Course Tools / Attendance

Setup a New Register

Attendance registers are entries that you create to track attendance for activities in your organization or course. For example, you can create attendance registers to track attendance for mandatory chat sessions, weekly seminars, or meetings. Use registers to define the sessions, attendance expectations, and applicable users and enter data as you complete each session. 

1. Click "New Register."
2. Enter a name for your register, such as "VSCC 1000 062 Weekly Attendance."
3. If desired, enter a description (optional).
4. Select the Attendance Scheme desired (you can change this later if needed). The default is "present/absent."
5. Set your Cause for Concern percentage (see below for more info).
6. Create Sessions for your class meetings by giving each session a name.
7. Click "Save."
8. As needed, use the "+Add Sessions" box to add more rows by entering a number and clicking the Add Sessions link. Then, continue entering a name (or date) to each session.
9. Click "Close" when you're done setting up the register.

Figure 2. Shows an example of a new register creation.

Figure 3. Shows an initial set of three sessions (with dates entered for session names) and the request to add 12 additional sessions.

Attendance Schemes & Calculations

Attendance schemes provide the criteria for marking attendance in a register. Each attendance register uses one attendance scheme, which you assign when creating a new register. while the register defines the applicable users and sessions, the attendance scheme defines the attendance statuses that you can give to users for each session. For example, a simple attendance scheme defines two possible attendance statuses: present and absent. If you were to apply this scheme to an attendance register, you would have two options for marking attendance for the register's sessions. Students that attend a session would be marked as present and students that do not attend would be marked as absent. You can create more complex schemes that define more statuses such as late/tardy, leaves early, or authorized absence. This provides flexibility to accommodate a wide range of attendance options.

How Attendance is Calculated

The % Attendance field is calculated by adding the total assigned % for each status and then dividing it by the number of statuses that have an assigned %. This is represented using the following illustrated formula:

Sum of Assigned % / Total of statuses with an Assigned % x 100

To understand how this calculation works in practice, consider a scheme with the following set of statuses:

Set your Cause for Concern Percentage

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

1. On the navbar, select Course Tools and click Attendance, click New Register or Edit Register from the menu of an existing attendance register.
2. In the Cause for Concern field, enter a percentage that indicates your minimum attendance requirement.
3. Click Save.

Create or Set Attendance Schemes

Use the Attendance Schemes menu to set up a new, personalized scheme for your class.

To create your own scheme, follow these steps:

1. Click "New Scheme."
2. Enter a name for your scheme.
3. Enter a symbol, full name, and percentage (%) for each level desired.
4. Click "Save."
5. As needed, use the "+Add Statuses" box to add more rows by entering a number and clicking the Add Statuses link. Then, continue entering details to each status.
6. Click "Close" once finished creating your custom scheme.
7. Note: If you already created a course register, you may need to edit the register and associate this newly created scheme.

Figure 4. Shows a sample list of attendance schemes.

Figure 5. Shows an example custom attendance scheme called PATE with P = Present, A = Absent, T = Tardy or Late, and E = Leave Early.

Track Attendance

1. From the Course Tools menu, click "Attendance."
2. Click the name of the attendance register you created (see above).
3. Click the pencil icon for a single session to be able to enter attendance data for each student.
4. You can click Set Status to set the same status for all users, which can save time by selecting all as "Present" and then individually change those that are not present to "Absent" or another status.

Figure 6. Example shows two session column headers and the "edit" pencil icon to use for attendance entry.

Delete Attendance Sessions, Registers, or Schemes

Deleting a session clears all associated attendance data. Caution: only delete sessions when you are confident that you no longer need the attendance data.

From the Attendance page, do one of the following:

• To delete sessions in a register or scheme, on the Edit Register page, click Delete beside the applicable session. All attendance registers must have at least one session.
• To delete a register or attendance scheme, from the menu, click Delete.