Course Connect - For Faculty & Staff: Attendance & Participation

To create an Attendance activity:

• Enter your course and turn on Edit Mode.
• Select Add an Activity or Resource in the appropriate topic.
• Select Attendance.
• Adjust settings as necessary (see below) and select Save and Display at the bottom of the page. 

Your activity is ready to use. See the box labeled Add a Session to learn more about using this activity. 

Common Settings for Attendance:

The only requirement for creating an Attendance activity is that it must have a name; all other settings are optional. Below are the most common settings that instructors adjust. 

• You can add a description, and choose whether or not to display the description on the main course page. 
• You may also want to adjust the grade type, maximum grade, or grade category settings under the Grade heading to align with your syllabus. If you do not want this activity to be graded, change the Grade Type to None. 
• If you want to use groups in this activity, change the Group Mode setting under Common Module Settings to the appropriate group type for your course (see the Groups tab). 
• After turning on group mode, if you want to restrict this activity to a specific group select Add Restriction under the Restrict Access section. 

Please note that if you plan on using a custom status set, you should create the status set before adding sessions. This will generate a Status Set option on the Add Session page, which will be located between the Time and Description settings pictured below. You will be able to use the drop-down Status Set menu to choose your preferred status set. See the Modifying the Status Set box on the right of this page to learn more about custom statuses. 

To Add a Session:

• From your course page, click on your Attendance activity
• Select the button Add Session; the following page will open:

• Under the Add Session heading, enter the Date and Time of your course
• You can add an optional description, and choose to create a calendar event for the session using the tick box under the description box. 
• If you do not want to create a repeating session, scroll to the bottom and select Add to create your single session. 

If you would like to automatically create a session for each class meeting:

• Look under the Multiple Sessions heading
• Select Repeat the session above as follows, and then select the day(s) on which your class meets
• Set an end date for your course in the Repeat Until setting, and adjust the Repeat Every setting as necessary. 
• Select Add at the bottom of the screen

To take Attendance:

• From your course page, click on your Attendance activity.
• Next to the session you would like to take attendance for, click on the triangle/play button in the Actions column.
• Select Present, Late, Excused, or Absent for each student, and add any additional remarks you have.
• Select Save and Show Next Page at the bottom of the page. 

Instead of simply recording attendance, you may also choose to record your students' effort and attention in class by using this same activity and renaming it 'Participation.' The attendance activity is highly customizable and you can replace the PLEA acronym with anything of their choosing. For example, in a participation activity the instructor may assign grades on a scale of AEPU (Active, Engaged, Prepared, Unprepared) and they may assign different grades for each option.

You can adjust the existing status set to reflect your own attendance or participation requirements. The statuses, values, and descriptions are highly customizable. You can either adjust the existing status set, or create your own. To access and customize your status set, first click on the activity from your course page. Then, select the More tab and choose Status Set (see image below).

On the following page, you will see the settings for the default status set. 

If you want to add options to the existing statuses, use the empty boxes located under the status Absent to add an acronym, description, and points. After adding your new status, select Add in the Self-Marking Availability column. 

If you do not want your students to be able to take their own attendance, you may also want to set each menu labeled Self-Marking Availability to Never.

To add a new status set, use the dop-down menu (pictured above) to select New Set of Statuses. You will see the following page:

On this screen, fill in the empty boxes with a memorable acronym, a description, and the appropriate points. Select Add to generate a new status row, and repeat until you have added all of your statuses. When you are done, your status set will be available to use when you add a new class session (see: Add a Session box on the left for more information).