Register attendance in Canvas
When a course has an examination that includes mandatory attendance, it makes the grade reporting easier if you get the attendance registration as a column in the Gradebook in Canvas. Different ways suit different sizes of courses. For smaller courses, attendance can be registered by the teacher in different ways, but for larger courses, it is better if students register their attendance themselves through a quiz.
Important for attendance registration:
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The correct students has to be registered as attending.
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Students who are not registered as attending should be able to see it.
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Attendance registration needs to be done efficiently.
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It should be easy to compile attendance for grade reporting.
These points are different in ease of meeting for small and larger student groups.
Take attendance of smaller student groups
For smaller student groups, the safest way to take attendance is for the teacher to manually register which students are participating. If you know the students, it is easy to identify who is participating, and otherwise a roll call does not take that long.
To register attendance in Canvas, we recommend one of the following ways:
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The built-in Role Call Attendance tool (community.canvaslms.com) .
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Create an assignment for participation on each mandatory occasion and choose to show the grade as Complete/incomplete.
Depending on how the summing up of attendance is to be done, the different methods may be suitable for different purposes. Roll Call Attendance gathers everything in one assessment, which is good if there are a lot of mandatory occasions that are valued equally. If there are only a few occasions, separate assignments might be more straightforward and allow students to easily see which opportunities they have missed and may need to supplement.
Use quizzes to register attendance of larger student groups
For larger groups of students, it is not reasonable for the teacher to note the attendance of each student manually. A good alternative is to use quizzes that students complete at some point during the mandatory activity. In order for non-present students not to have access to the quiz, it is important to use a password on the quiz that only those in the room will know. Also, limit the amount of time the quiz is available.
Read more about how to set up Quizzes for examination .