Options in Taking Attendance

Audience

WSU Faculty teaching in a traditional, blended, online, or ITV environment.

Overview

The Attendance tool enables you to create attendance registers and schemes in your D2L courses. Attendance registers are defined by the instructor and, using attendance schemes to define attendance statuses, record student activity and track attendance within your course. D2L's Attendance tool includes customizable thresholds for alerting the teacher when attendance issues arise.

Possible Attendance Tools

D2L Brightspace Attendance Tool

Brightspace includes an Attendance tool. The professor selects the criteria for recording attendance (known as the "scheme") and creates an attendance sheet (the "register") to record attendance whenever appropriate. Thresholds can be set within the tool to flag unacceptable levels of attendance.

Attendance data is stored in the course itself. However, if attendance points are to be awarded in the grade book, the professor must enter them manually.

More information on the Attendance tool is available here.

D2L Quiz Tool

Simple, low-stakes quizzes can be used to record attendance. Since points for quizzes go directly into the Brightspace grade book, recording attendance is easy. Additionally, the quizzes can be used to gauge student understanding and preparedness.

The downside of using quizzes for attendance is that a unique quiz and a unique grade item must be created for each time attendance is to be taken.

More information on Brightspace quizzes in available here.

Top Hat

Each Top Hat course contains an automated mechanism for collecting attendance. When the professor opens attendance for a course, a one-time-use four-digit code is displayed. Each student that replies with the code in marked as present for that session. If the Top Hat course is attached to a Brightspace course, the attendance data can be exported into Grades as a decimal percentage. A formula can then be applied to the attendance data in Grades to make attendance worth as many points as the professor desires.

More information on Top Hat usage is available here.

Involvio

Involvio is a student-engagement system that includes campus calendars, student orientation, and attendance modules. The attendance module supports several different means for recording student attendance, including swiping student IDs (this requires a plug-in device for the professor's phone that reads the ID), manual entry by the professor, and QR scanning.

More information is available on the Involvio web site.

Comparing Tool Functionality

Tool	Who records attendance?		Data export to D2L		Notes
D2L Brightspace Attendance Tool	Faculty		Yes		The professor marks each student present or absent within the Brightspace course itself. Attendance is recorded directly in Brightspace but any attendance points in Grades must be entered manually.
D2L Brightspace Quiz Tool	Brightspace		Yes		Simple, one-question quizzes can be used to take attendance. The points for the quiz are automatically recorded in Grades.
Top Hat	Students		Yes		Students mark themselves as present by replying with a code generated by Top Hat. The code is different every time attendance is taken. Attendance points can be automatically recorded in D2L course Grades as a decimal percentage.
Involvio	Faculty or Students		No		Supports automated and manual entry of attendance data.

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