How are you keeping attendance today, if at all? Are there ways we could track attendance that would not require any action by the educator? Is there some way we could track attendance through "normal" learner course activity?
| Product Version (if applicable): | 0 |
So True Szymon!! You are a true Rock star and your students are lucky to attend your classes!
We have several courses/programs that need to report on attendance and our financial aid office is asking more and more attendance information of our faculty members. An easy way to track/attendance/participation in Blackboard should have been done years ago. I can't believe we are still asking for this basic functionality. Then adding in polleverywhere into the course would be easier because we would have the attendance/participation area to use that data (if wanted.)
Pat S.
I know that from a different university from which I currently work/attend, that attendance is taken on Day 1 by access and/or submission of the "Introduce Yourself" post. Most of the classes I have taken or am responsible for do not include "attendance" as part of grade, but discussion engagement is included as a gradable item.
-svk
I guess its a mixture of technology....
Users at our University tend to use spreadsheets and some e forms. The best one I've seen up to know is a Google Sheet configured into a course area on Blackboard that only the Tutors have access to read/write.
Maybe something for Blackboard to explore.... maybe using XpLor or even a new tool addition to ULTRA
Watch this space I guess?
Recently, we have seen interest on campus in using student ID cards to take attendance in large lecture halls. We don't have a system in place yet, but it is likely that we will have a few faculty trying something like this out in the Fall. It would be great if the data from those could easily be transmitted and viewed in Blackboard, but separately from the Grade Center (a Smart View might be enough to make this work), so that faculty don't have to see 50 columns of daily attendance data. That could feed into the analytics engine, as well, to see how student attendance relates to overall course grade.
Hi Brad -
Depending on the size of the course, many instructors manually track attendance with sign-in sheets. But others, especially those with larger enrollments, use technology like QR codes or clickers. Either they use the clicker to take attendance straight up, or they use clicker questions throughout the class session and aggregate the results for attendance points. The clicker data goes to the gradebook. Instructors who use QR codes dump the data in a separate spreadsheet and aggregate the info into the grade center. Online courses often use discussion and logins as attendance markers.
ANGEL had a nice way to issue a daily attendance code to students for them to enter manually to verify attendance. While this does not track attendance through learner course activity, maybe a random daily question instead of an attendance code could work -- get student's to respond to something based on what they're learning while also triggering a bit of data information about attendance. Now make that flexible enough to work within the mobile app and the system, and you've got some potential. (Downsides: Faculty have to set this up if it's content-specific and not randomized/generalized, and some faculty will not allow laptops or mobile devices.)
Speaking of mobile apps... I'd love to see a solution to help an instructor or TA quickly check off a student's presence, maybe something that's integrated with Bb Instructor and synchronized to the course roster. The ID card scan with Transact and the cloud is interesting, but I would want something less depending on a student having his ID card with him at class (or giving it to a friend).
Great topic!
Regards,
Mariann
We have developed a tool for a spanish university that integrates with courses and include several modules.
The main attendance module is a course tool available to instructors that shows a kind of roster with students photos from an external database and checkboxes to mark students that there are not connected. The instructor can add comments to the attendance register and manage it via a contextual menu. The student view is a tool that shows all the registers for the student in the course with date, commentary and instructor email who registered it.
HI there Alberto
Do you have some more information about this tool please? We are looking for something similar.
Regards
What a shame !, I have not received or seen the notice of his question. Now that my colleague David has shared the video of the solution we have running, I hope you get an idea of its operation.
We are working on a new internationalized version, with improved usability, based on the feedback from existing customers, which allows use the photos from the social profile or to provide the official institution users photos through a secure server.
I apologize again for not answering earlier.
Attendance in online classes at our community college must include participation in a discussion board or assignment completion. This is done mostly for financial aid reasons. Logging into Blackboard is not considered attendance in an online class.
At one school I use the Free Online Attendance tool that is within Learn 9.1. At another school, I create a one question attendance quiz and provide the answers during lectures. Some of my peers use submission of homework as attendance for that week.
I would love to see Bb Inc include some attendance tool in their base product. That would be accessible via the BbStudent App & Web browser. It would record the date, time, & IP used during student flagging their attendance. Maybe even have the option to restrict by IP and only allow student marking of attendance during a specific time period. Faculty could access & mark attendance anytime during the course.
Real dream is they would somehow use their student badge to record their attendance.
There was a session at BbWorld15 on attendance tracking. Looks like Bb has something in the works that uses a new card reader they have developed addressing physical attendance. For online I would recommend some of the financial aid reports that focus on activity.
Yeah, I tried to go to that session but the room listed in mobile app was incorrect so I never got the info. Did you attend the session? If so do you have any information to share?
What I understand though it is an additional purchase from Bb Consulting. The Financial Aid reports will only work for faculty that do attendance based on activity. I am not one of those faculty. For F2F classes, activity submission doesn't mean attending class.
In the session, if I have this correct - you need Bb transact. Possibly fall release date.
Thanks Bryan for the additional info. Transact makes sense if a school has their Transact system tied to SIS, Learn, & Financial systems or are using Transact fully. It doesn’t make sense for the majority of the schools who just have the academic side of the house.
Yes, you are correct Bryan. If your school has transact, it could take attendance just with students swiping their IDs when entering a class. The software and functionality looked good however, not sure about how practical it would be to implement this into every class. It really needs to be tied into Learn somehow.
People have been asking for an attendance tool in Learn for many many years
That's cool - we use Transact and have the tappable (and swipable... swipeable?) IDs.
We have experimented with using RF classroom response devices for attendance and it works ok for the most part, but it's a bit of a hack for the technology (and the relative ease of using it in large sections seems to make the 4 students who have problems a much bigger deal than it is)... I wonder how much of an improvement student IDs would be (and also what the cost per classroom would be, since TurningPoint is pretty cheap per classroom (although the students may beg to differ).
I believe you had to have a swipe reader device in each classroom to do this which would not be very feasible. Poll Everywhere just released a gradebook which takes attendance. Not sure how or if that would integrate with Bb or not however.
Thanks for mentioning this Erik. Their website says it has LMS integration. I requested a sales call to discuss.
Erik, talked with one of their sales reps today. They said it did work with Blackboard. I am scheduling a demo in a couple of weeks. Seeing is believing.
How did the demo go?
TONS of great feedback here, thank you all so much for the conversation. For institutions whose attendance is tied to financial aid - could you tell me more about that? I've spent a lot of time fielding attendance requests over the years (both at ANGEL and Bb) but don't think I've ever heard about how it is associated with financial aid.
Brad - we a two year technical college (similar to a community college) and our faculty are required to take attendance for each date the course meets face-to-face or in terms of a blended/hybrid course once per week based on assignment completion/logon activity. If a student drops the course and is on financial aid, the financial aid department has to access that attendance data to report back to the federal government last date of attendance and also to determine if they have to send aid back or not. We currently use the Baylor attendance building block with Learn but like others have mentioned, there is not integration with the grade center, retention center or login activity. Ideally a built in attendance system within Learn that integrates with Retention Center and Grade Center, allows attendance tracking for face-to face meetings and also allows the ability to track how many hours minutes a student physically attends class (we have aviation and nursing programs that are required by the state or FAA to report attendance by the hour or minute) would work best for us.
Okay, I had the request yesterday for a system that would allow a student to apply for an excused absence that the TA in charge would then change the score for the day to Exempt I guess. Details were not that great in the request. I suspect that the prof uses iClickers here for attendance taking which smacks right in the face of the person who developed the iClicker here for other reasons. The TA gets an emailed request with info collected from a web form and then he has to go to the grade center and then find the student and the day in question to make the edits.
In the Baylor Attendance B2 that we use, there are several options for attendance: Present (the default option), Absent, Late, Excused absence, and Unexcused absence. Entry of student's attendance is manual, but it is easy. If all students are present, just open Attendance and save. But there is no link to Grade Center, and no interface that allows students to register their own attendance.
We don't have Transact, so it looks like the Blackboard Attendance solution is useless for us.
We are fully-online, and so it is hard to identify the correct inputs to coach instructors toward manual record-keeping and impossible to divine or rely on physical attendance alone (transact). We have a really robust participation/attendance tracking tool, deployed as a B2, which generates records on the basis of student action. It is tied pretty closely to the gradebook and to student engagement with gradable material. Bb Consulting developed this for us - think we had to do a lot of learning together in the development process to get to the degree of accuracy and granularity that we were looking for. Protip, Blackboard offers a ton of student and staff workflows, so in a fully-automated solution isolating an event to the student is key (example, differentiating between a submission by the student and a submission on behalf of the student).
We use the Attendance B2 developed by Baylor University. It works OK, but is not integrated with Grade Center, so giving participation credit based on attendance is laborious. We, too, have been wanting a Blackboard version of Attendance for years. Our instructors are required to record attendance for all on-campus courses.
In my opinion, Bb adding attendance to Transact is a way to try and get clients to purchase another Bb product. From working at a University who has the transact system but uses it very limited and does not have it connected to our SIS the added feature of attendance still isn't a solution because we would need to purchase card readers for each classroom, but from a programming view the Transact system is less complicated than Learn. Bb Consulting has written an attendance building block (for purchase) for Learn that does what most of us have been asking for, but Bb chooses to keep that as a money making instead of incorporating it into their base product and keeping clients happy. We also use the FREE Online Attendance tool developed by Baylor and it gets the job done, but not only does it not integrate with Grade Center for attendance based on activity it requires manual setup of course dates and has no administrative level reporting (only instructor level) built in. We have some instructors trying the Poll Everywhere tool so students can use their phones and some have even looked at apps "MyAttendanceTracker" For online classes, I have used the collaborate to record attendance within the Grade Center, but that if a school doesn't have Collaborate that doesn't work either.
Attendance is a core classroom activity (traditional or online) for K12 and Higher Education and Bb knows this and yet continues to dismiss the fact that their LMS does not have such a core classroom feature. I hate to say it but their competitors (Canvas & D2L) have attendance. Seems like they could add the Bb developed consulting B2 into 9.1 base product and then work on converting (improving) as Ultra enhancement on the new API.
My suggestion is that Attendance should be part o the new Bb Instructor app as a Participation tool. That way it can be used both online and in a physical classroom. The tool should have the ability to not only mark attendance but also to be able to make notes against a particular student (perhaps linked to the Note Taking tool in the Retention Centre). But also should have this linked to a single column in the Grade Centre. The students should be easy to find and should have the possibility for the institution to upload their photos from a studentID database or something. The notes should be stored as history based on the classes/sessions scheduled so that they can be sorted by class or session.
There should also be multiple ways to take attendance. 1. The students check-in with a password supplied in the session (or a QR code or similar). 2. The teacher (or someone else in the room) takes attendance in the typical way by calling a role or just marking faces off the list while the class begins. 3. The institution links the tool to a database of ID card barcodes (or some such thing) and the app just sits at the door on a tablet or something and as the students walk in and they can scan their ID cards (or in the case they've forgotten it can sign-in with a signature or face capture alternative depending on institutional policy etc). 4. Automatic attendance based on their joining a course Bb Collaborate session. It would be great if you could also select a student and see what they actually did during a Collaborate sessions (eg. chats they made, whiteboards they contributed to, audio comments etc.)
It would also be good if you could link the activity in the Bb course site (from existing reports) with a particular class or session so you could monitor their out-of-class activity/participation as well as their in-class activity related to that session's content.
Lot to ask yes haha.... but ideal world right?
Hi Lauren Hives,
What "Note Taking tool in the Retention Centre" are you referring to?
Thanks,
Melissa
Hi Melissa,
Every student has a potentially has a page which appears to only be available if they are at risk . Not sure you can get to it any other way atm (except through the Bb Grader app if there is an assignment available).
But it is kinda nice cause you can see communications you make with that student as well as add notes to the student. You access it by clicking on the student's name in the Retention Centre.
Thank you Lauren Hives I never noticed the "add a note" link before. It is a shame Bb doesn't make that feature available without them being at risk. This information is helpful.
At our school - Community College - most instructors take attendance (sometimes called participation) in classes. We do have faculty that do not take attendance.
For the majority of faculty the lack of attendance tool is a major concern. Faculty have asked for attendance to have class meetings added by the system and also the ability to add a column in the grade center if they use attendance/participation in course. (This functionality is done with an LMS our school has hidden form students and instructors - Jenzabar eLearning.)
Faculty would like options to mark as present, absent, tardy, left early, excused (exempt), and if participation is monitored (present - participating, present - not participating)
It doesn't fully fit the requirements you're all describing (excused, late, etc ...+ linked to grade center) but one workaround to take attendance can be to use a building block called "signup list" (it's a pretty cool one connected to groups and which can be used for many things). You could create batch sign-up lists (one for each session) and make the list of the day available for 5 minutes during the class : students sign up online to the list, then you can have a "batch view" and export it to csv ... a few formulas and you can count how many times they've been absent, or generate a grade (which you're reimport to the grade center).
It's a lot of playing around and hacking features, I admit ... It's hard to believe BB didn't create an attendance feature yet, so I'm guessing it's on purpose (maybe to sell Transact ).
Sorry for being so late to this fascinating discussion. I have faculty who want to take attendance at each class for participation scores. Many do it with student clickers (we use iclicker.com) by having the students take a short quiz. The grade is primarily on participation, not on whether the answers were correct. This is a formative assessment, not a high-stakes assessment. Then the faculty member can upload the results to Blackboard, so the students can see whether they were counted as present.
The problem is the number of grade center columns this creates. Would it be possible to simplify creation of multiple views of the grade center? I would want students to be able to view the attendance/participation grade as a single column when looking at their grades. Then I would want them to be able to click (on something) and jump to a view that has all of the individual attendance/participation grades as well as the reported/calculated grade.
Is that something that could be done? Is it already available and I just don't know how to do it?
For years I had faculty make a Pool question of "Are you here, Yes or No?", where Yes was 1 point, in order to sell faculty that if students said no it was the student's fault for being a jerk.
Then each test had its own PWD where it was given as a test named W01D01 through W16D03 (Week 1-Day 1 through Week 16-Day 3). Certainly it is cumbersome the 1st time building it, but once it is built just export for download on your help site for faculty to reuse. Its a decent naming convention for multiple days per week, 5-8-12-16 week sessions, yadda-yadda. From that one time of building the pools and exams it can be imported to every section, exams can be deleted/hidden by professors without IT support having to care, and the 1 point fills in the Grade Center column nicely for clear attendance. (Plug-chug-forget-let the faculty do their thing) This averts having to put in the date each term/year, and the sameness also means a database can accept this for trend data later over many years, classes, all that data mining joy! Especially if they stick to W01D01 for the convention.
Then some coordinator's secretary makes a calculated column in the exported Excel later to get a total as the rest of the college just wants that class' instance info. Again, someone else's issue to play with ...
Categories and rules can be used to give points or not but the grid in Excel is perfect for the administration. (Some schools at the CC level have factors for reimbursement so there will be no question for obtaining credit and it can be compared to the last date of attendance on file.) Some like to give extra credit off of these columns knowing its good will since 5 to 48 points will be a drop in the bucket.
I always told faculty to do a quasi-visual head count in class to see if the volume exceeds what is present. We know that after the PWD is given out a person could email another person at home to alert them to take the test/attendance quiz. If someone was not there off of the head-count >> automatic drop or F or violating the honor code.
I think the QR option is great as one could place a big image on the classroom screen to partly authenticate.
So could we have
1) login
2) PWD
3) QR to authenticate
4) take my my picture
as a multi-part submission completed in succession so we don't have to use Transact if we don't want to have it?
Frankly the picture is just to mess with them as one cannot be sure the person was physically there, if one person used 2+phones to take their same picture, or if a picture was not take of a picture. This should close the loop for 90% of the issues and student ingenuity on thwarting the system. Then just make it easier to port to the ERP/CRM so we can skill the Excel export. That would make so many happy and those who cannot care less about attendance from participating an a consistent way for a database. I know many judges would love this for court appointed training on-site at CCs.
Darran Hurd
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/darran-hurd/2/4a9/124
http://www.HigherEdBuilders.com
815-409-9388
2211 Cedar Ridge Dr.
Plainfield, IL 60586
Thanks again to everyone for your detailed feedback. I recently spoke with the Product Manager who worked on our new attendance tool that many of you saw at BbWorld. I've attached to the original Idea a couple PDF's that he passed along, one is a white paper on attendance and the other is a summary sheet of what we've built. I also discovered that you do NOT have to license Transact to take advantage of this new functionality. I do expect that we'll pursue an integration with Learn in some form, but I don't have any further detail to share on what that might look like or timelines right now. Please let me know if you have any specific questions on the new offering and I'll get answers back to the group as quickly as I can.
This blog post might be of interest to some of you - Learning Environments blog » Recording Attendance through a Grade Centre Rubric
In summary:
The blog post even includes a rubric you can import to your own Bb course if you think it meets your needs.
We track attendance through academic work submission. The last date of attendance is the date they last submitted work. Just clicking into the course will not count as participation for us.
Watch the video about the bbroster we developed: http://www.kaltura.com/tiny/s8azv
We are working in the english release and it takes the photo from different sources. Very cool!
Qwickly has just released an attendance option for early next year: http://www.goqwickly.com/attendance/
We've recently been testing out a trial of the Qwickly Attendance Module and it is AMAZING! I really like it, and I think we might end up adopting it. There are a few things about it that our faculty still want to see (ability to have excused absences, ability to have tardy/partial attendance counted, etc) - but when I spoke to the Qwickly Rep, he told me that many of the features we're still wanting will be coming out with updates to the building block in the near future. I personally found it very easy to use and very easy to set up! I had a group of about 40 faculty test it out for me, and they all seemed to really like it!
Does anyone find it strange that we are worried about attendance but at the same time hearing about personalized adaptive learning being the way to go which will end up with some students earning credit in much less time than other students?
Rick - Good point - the attendance option is for our face to face classes and our programs that need to show time in seat to accreditation visits and state certification boards. The lack of attendance is not an issue with our online courses. It is something that should be incorporated in a basic LMS that serves both face to face and online courses. Pat S.
I wrote an Oracle query that will count the number of times all users have accessed their courses in a specified timeframe. That's as far as we go for "attendance" since the notion of it for online courses is somewhat fuzzy to begin with.
Cliff:
Any chance I could get your Oracle query (count the number of times all users have accessed their courses in a specified timeframe)?
Thanks,
Ed
Here you go. You should be able to tweak it to suit your needs.
Help
Privacy
Behind the Blackboard
Blackboard.com
select u.lastname,u.firstname,u.student_id, cm.course_id, cm.batch_uid as course_batch_uid,
(select count(*) from activity_accumulator aa where u.pk1 = aa.user_pk1 and cm.pk1 = aa.course_pk1) as hits
from course_users cu
join users u on u.pk1 = cu.users_pk1
join course_main cm on cm.pk1 = cu.crsmain_pk1
where aa.timestamp > to_date('07-DEC-2014','DD-MON-YYYY')
and aa.timestamp <= to_date('08-DEC-2014','DD-MON-YYYY')
and cm.row_status = 0 and cm.available_ind = 'Y'
and cu.row_status = 0 and cu.available_ind = 'Y'
and u.row_status = 0 and u.available_ind = 'Y'
and cu.role = 'S'
order by hits;
couple of tips on this SQL:
Hope this helps,
-DR
All good points.
1) I hadn't thought of that, but you're right. Every bit helps.
2) OpenDB (for Managed Hosting clients) doesn't allow any sort of modification, including CREATE or SELECT INTO statements. It pains me greatly.
3) In our case, if a student is no longer on Blackboard (i.e., they're in a disabled/unavailable status), then they're no longer at the institution. Thus, we don't care about their attendance. Your point is still valid, however.
4) Good tip about DISTINCT for certain use cases.
We're a managed hosting client and had an extraordinarily difficult time getting the Hardin-Simmons (formerly Baylor) Online Attendance tool to work. A few weeks ago, we did a webinar with Qwickly and are now piloting their Attendance tool for this semester. For online courses, attendance isn't so much of an issue, because there are several options available for tracking attendance in one form or another.
However, we are transitioning to an LMS-for-all environment in July, and one of the biggest cries we heard from faculty was the desire to use Bb to take attendance so that it could be incorporated into their Grade Centers. So, we're giving this a shot. Will report back in a month or two on our progress.
As promised, here's a short report on our experience with the Qwickly attendance tool so far.
First, I have to say that Qwickly is doing an extraordinary job of communicating with us regarding updates to the B2. They have released several updates to the B2 and have been responsive to our requests for enhancements and new features. Of course, it probably doesn't hurt matters that I post updates and questions on Twitter from time to time (@rhargismccc), letting Qwickly know how things are going in a more public forum.
The B2 creates a column in the Grade Center, and allows the instructor to decide whether they want attendance to be calculated as a percentage of 100 or if they want a value assigned to each class attendance (so, if a class meets 15 times a semester, an instructor could have each class attended equal 1 point and easily see how many sessions a student missed by looking at that total number). There is also the option of not including a column in the Grade Center and merely having the attendance data displayed in the tool itself.
Initially, the B2 was very limited and only allowed instructors to enter attendance data live. However, that was remedied in subsequent updates, and now instructors are permitted to edit records. An instructor DOES have to log in on the day of class, however, as that is what creates a new column. So, if an instructor waits a couple of days to enter the attendance data, the records will not have the correct meeting date listed. Also, it is a Present/Absent sort of deal, so there are no options for "Excused Absence" or "Tardy".
The B2 has worked well with the exception of an issue with version 3.1.3 when it was originally released. It wouldn't allow new users to set up the tool. We are Managed Hosting, and other Bb admins in self-hosted environments reported no issues. In this case, Qwickly was very responsive and had a patch available within 24 hours.
The next update, scheduled for next week, is reported to include the ability to export attendance data to .CSV files.
The functionality is still somewhat limited, but it certainly far superior to what we originally had in place (nothing).
I'll continue reporting periodically to let you know how our pilot is going.
Cheers,
~R
Thank you so much for sharing the results of your testing with this group!
Hi Rodney,
I wanted to share some updates we have coming to Qwickly Attendance that will be available in early summer.
I've outlined these features in greater detail here:Qwickly Attendance is getting some exciting enhancements this summer
Thanks for the heads up Matt! It's funny, we were just talking about Qwickly because we're upgrading our production environment on the 20th and we're going to install the new Building Block then. We're still on version 3.1.3 because we were in mid-semester when the most recent version came out. Looking forward to the new updates!
~Rodney
Very good Rodney! You'll be upgrading to version 3.3 which has a number of new features over 3.1.3 that you can enjoy before we release our big summer update
Hello,
We've been working on an attendance control solution called Attendee. It has dynamic calendar, dynamic search, statistics and print-ready reporting, it's free and it's worth taking a look. What do you think?
Hi Daniel Soriano , thanks for sharing and making it freemium ! I've just installed it on our test environment, so here is a bit of feedback.
It looks great, it's easy to deploy, and very user friendly : I can see professors using it without needing further explainations or tutorials.
A few suggestions for the UX/features :
I think those 3 points would help a lot for regular attendance usecase.
Then I think of a cool feature that could be developped for the Premium version because it's definitely something many Professors would want : "self check in"
Professor side : in the attendance tool, a button to "start self check in" and "stop self check in"
Student side : a tool link that would have been added by the professor in the left menu. When self check in is closed : the link is available but they get to a page with a message saying it's not open yet. When self check in is open : they get the date and a checkbox to tick that they're here, once they've ticked they're kicked out of the page and get a thank you message.
Professor side : he can stop the self check in, see how many students are said "present" and count how many people in his classroom. He can change what has been recorded. Ideally he could reset the self check in too, in case he see there's different between the number of "checked" students and the actual number of students in the room, then he can reset and warn students of consequences of cheating and then re-start the check in.
What often happens in class nowadays is the professor doesn't want to loose class time doing attendance one by one, so he hands out a piece of paper, students sign, then he takes the paper and ask questions at random people from the list during the class ; if it turns out someone supposed to be here is not then he does take attendance one by one. The self check in feature would enable to not loose time with attendance (other than 5 minutes to count the number of students and compare), while being more accurate than the "paper to sign with random calls" version. Also, with the "paper to sign" then an assistant need to type it anyway afterwards, which is double workload that could be avoided with the building block.
Curious how the Premimu version works, especially for exports, and system level aspects. Any indication regarding the price ? Trials ?
Thanks again for this building block, you've done a great job I'm sure many users will be thankful for this.
Is this still available? The link in your post no longer works.
Yes, Yes, Yes -- Attendance tool would be wonderful. It also needs to be able to interface with the Grade Center.
Back 5 years ago, we ran eRacer (Jenzabar) with Blackboard. It was a nightmare. But,.... the only thing that eRacer had over Blackboard was their attendance tool. A column could be created in the Grade Center or not. It must be simple to use and.... maybe there could be an app???
Diane
Because all Amarillo College classes have Blackboard presence, not just online classes, attendance is an important feature for our faculty. Currently, we have a card reader system in each classroom that sends attendance info to our student database (Colleague), but many, many of our faculty have requested for that data to be auto-imported into Blackboard. I realize this is specific to our institution, but thought there may be others who have a similar situation.
I would definitely be interested in learning more about the card reader system you have setup. Do you have a separate dashboard with the attendance record that faculty can access?
Yes, we do. It is a part of Ellucian’s portal system. This is the area that used to be called “WebAdvisor” in the stand-alone dashboard; now in the portal it is called “Self-Service”. The card scanners auto-input the attendance, but faculty can edit the information and/or add comments. The current options are a dropdown for Present, Absent, and Late, with an additional field for internal comments. The system has a field that tracks absences, number of times late, and the last date of attendance.
I hope this answers your question.
Heather Voran
Director of Blackboard Administrative and Support Services
Lead Instructional Designer
Center for Teaching and Learning
Amarillo College
Ware Student Commons 205G
Office: 806-371-5150
Fax: 806-371-5944
hlvoran@actx.edu<mailto:hlvoran@actx.edu>
IMPORTANT: If you need immediate assistance, please email ctlhelp@actx.edu<mailto:ctlhelp@actx.edu>, and the first available CTL Representative will assist you.
We migrated from ANGEL to Blackboard a few years ago. ANGEL had an Attendance feature and all of our faculty used it. One of the largest complaints I received when we migrated to Bb, was the lack of the attendance feature. While it may seem like a minor feature, we have business processes (e.g. financial aide, retention, student success initiatives, etc.) tied directly to attendance. As an administrator, I am constantly being asked when this feature will be available. Faculty must take attendance as a matter of college policy. Many faculty tie attendance to final course grades as it aligns with our "Core Abilities" whereby students must demonstrate Professional Workplace Behavior (such as attending class on time). Many faculty also report when students are "Tardy" as well. Take a look at the ANGEL feature...it worked well for us. PLEASE make faculty and administrators happy...get this one done!
I don’t think attendance should be mandatory unless a few ‘free days’ are provided, because I think by the university level, students have the right and responsibility to prioritize their own time, I think it would be unfair for a student to be penalized if they, for instance, chose to forgo a lecture in favor of working on a semester project.
I'm with you for that special use case, but Blackboard Learn is a very versatile tool used in a wide variety of environments, that's why an attendance control tool would be so interesting. Even in the university level you will need to track attendance to practical sessions.
We have developed several attendance tracking solutions, even with automated reporting to program coordinators, instructor's use statistics and a lot of specific features, but as I have said, the requirements of each institutions are so different that every solution is custom tailored.
We don't offer a general solution simply because we find it too simple to meet most of the customers requirements or too complex to try to accomplish a bigger selection of use cases.
It's been a while since I messed around with the "Online Attendance" building blocks developed by Baylor (attendancev234.war) and Hardon-Simmons (attendancev240.war). When I last investigated this as an option for our managed-hosted Blackboard environment, it was a no-go since the building block required use of a Windows database server (Blackboard Managed-Hosting uses Oracle db servers) and our institution couldn't or didn't want to set up a dedicated server just for this feature.
Are there newer versions of this B2 or comparable B2s out their for "attendance" tracking? I've been looking around online and have found several tutorials for the use of an "Online Attendance" tool - training that appears to be intended for faculty users of Blackboard - but I have found little information that might be relevant to a Bb admin. I have grown pretty weary of looking for potential solutions for our current LMS only to be pitched a new ancillary product, so a community developed B2 that works for managed-hosted clients (preferably without having to make use of additional db servers) is definitely something of interest.
Relevant links:
Online Attendance B2
Baylor - Hardin Simmons Attendance Building Block
Attendee B2 (aka Asistencia de Control Plugin)
My school is looking for a way to track attendance in online courses for financial aid purposes. Right now, faculty have to manually enter their attendance in our student information system at about two weeks into the course. This is so we can confirm that students who received financial aid are actively participating in their courses. Since these courses do not have face to face attendance, the attendance reporting has to be based on the student having submitted some sort of significant assignment in Blackboard. This differs based on the course.
It would be great to have a system that allowed instructors to "tag" a particular assignment as the "attendance" assignment, have that automatically report back to the SIS, and even be able to pull a report that shows which students are not participating in their courses.
This is becoming more of a big deal as schools offer more online courses and programs.
Has anyone looked at Qwickly attendance tool?
I do not track attendance. Participation is far more important. If lectures are boring and not helpful forced attendance misses the point.
Peer instruction like polleverywhere embedded in Bb Learn would do wonders for tracking participation and increase the product features for classroom courses.