Filter by section in attendance report?

[j_m_p_a_langedi]

I would be very convenient to filter students' attendance by section in the downloaded attendance report. E.g. in my course I have a section called "lectures" and a section called "projects". In the attendance menu in Canvas we do list the students' attendance by section. But when I download the attendance report and open it in Excel, I cannot filter by section. Or at least, I haven't been able to figure this out. The pivot table function Excel hasn't provided the solution I'm looking for (although it is a handy tool to list and check the attendance by student).

Anyone who knows how to solve this? Thank you!

Jeroen

[kblack · Accepted solution]

Hi  @j_m_p_a_langedi  - I fear that this may be a lost cause for you. I played around with this a bit, and the issue is how the sections are created.  If they are created "by hand," if you will--and it sounds like yours are--then indeed there is no way that the downloaded attendance report will be able to help. At my own institution, we will cross-list courses with different numbers into one course site. (For example, certain American Studies courses may be cross-listed with a Sociology course.) In this case, the attendance report will work by section and the reason is that each section in fact has their own SIS ID.  And that is indeed a column that the attendance report generates and, therefore, can work with a pivot table.  But in cases/institutions where the SIS Course ID, Course Code, and Course Name are all the same within the course regardless of the number of sections you may have in the course, the report will be of no help.

In your case, I suspect that you created two separate sections but --since they are within the same course site--there is but one SIS ID (if your institution even uses a student information system to integrate with Canvas, to begin with), Course Name, etc.  I'm afraid this is yet another item to add to the list of things why an https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1090-attendance-overhaul is needed!

[j_m_p_a_langedi]

Hi Ken, thanks for your response. I understand that in order to make this work we need a SIS course ID assigned to each section. Do you know if I should be able to do this myself? And if so, how? (I do not have Canvas administrator rights in our school).

Thanks again.

Jeroen