Suggested enhancements to the Attendance plugin

Suggested enhancements to the Attendance plugin

by Peter Rundqvist -
Number of replies: 3

Hi,

We're heavily dependent on the Attendance plugin. We have courses that run for the whole of the semester containing hundreds of users. We use the attendance plugin to define "Lessons", or "Lectures" within the course. The courses consist of a face-to-face lecture and a subsequent Quiz.

The activity setup is like this:

  • One Attendance activity
  • One Quiz activity

To prevent the users from seeing the Quiz before-hand we have added an access condition for the Quiz (i.e. users need to get a pass grade in the Attendance activity to be able to see the Quiz activity)

The current design of the Attendance activity doesn't seem to implement the concept of "adding users on a per-session-basis before-hand and then allowing the teacher to mark the users as present when they show up for the lecture (whose duration corresponds w/ the session duration)".

What I would have liked to see is a feature were we would be able to add a set of users before-hand to a specific Attendance session but not setting their attendance status at this time. Then, during class, the teacher could just tick them of as present/absent, preferably using a block showing the users for the current session and check box next to them.

Are there any other methods to achieve this, maybe?

Kind regards,

Peter Rundqvist

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Peter Rundqvist

Re: Suggested enhancements to the Attendance plugin

by Emma Richardson -
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The current design of the Attendance activity doesn't seem to implement the concept of "adding users on a per-session-basis before-hand and then allowing the teacher to mark the users as present when they show up for the lecture (whose duration corresponds w/ the session duration)".

What do you mean? This is exactly what happens when you add a session...
In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: Suggested enhancements to the Attendance plugin

by Peter Rundqvist -
Hi Emma,

I’m not sure I understand exactly what you mean; adding a session and then clicking ”take attendance” only present me w/ a list containing *all* participants. I then need to browse through the list and mark the attendance for the user. The problem is, given that we have hundreds of participants and the lack of a search box (only being able to use the first/last name filter isn’t an effective way of finding the desired participants), that this is a very time consuming activity during a live class situation. If it would have been possible to put a subset of participants into the particular session beforehand, it would have simplified the process a lot. Do you mean that you are able to do that? In our setup, this possibility doesn’t exist.

Kind regards,
Peter
In reply to Peter Rundqvist

Re: Suggested enhancements to the Attendance plugin

by Wanlun Xue -
If you create groups and put these subset of students into that group, when you add the attendance activity choose allow groups, then when you take attendance, you can view students by groups