[ARCHIVED] Students mark themselves present in Attendance

[astolle]

Asking for a teacher, but is there a way for students to mark themselves present in Canvas? Especially for larger courses with multiple students, it would be helpful to not spend 10 minutes just marking attendance. I suggested using the Top Hat integration, but any other ideas?

[jonesn16]

This is a problem I tried to solve for an instructor dealing with ~70 students at a time. The biggest obstacle was falsifiability; almost any self-reporting method you give a student in Canvas has the potential to be falsified. One option we considered was a daily quiz the instructor could give. The instructor sets a password that they give at the beginning of class only once people are ready to start. The instructor can also use Quiz Log Auditing to catch if anyone starts the quiz minutes later than the others.

TopHat has the nice geofencing function, but you can't guarantee every student will have access to a device that can interact with it (I believe it requires bluetooth?). I also find TopHat's marketing tactics unethical, so I'm less inclined to recommend them on that principle alone.

[astolle]

Thank you Nicholas!