Alternative Attendance Tool

[tcrandall]

Hi friends!

Canvas Admin here!

My Institution recently adopted a new Student Information System (Anthology Student) which unfortunately doesn't play perfectly with Roll Call Attendance within Canvas.  Hoping to get some community insights into other potential attendance tools that integrate with Canvas.

1. What application/platform do you use to track attendance if not Roll Call?
2. Is attendance a percentage of a student's course grade at your institution?
3. Is attendance synced to your Student Information System?

The biggest issue we face with Roll Call is its inability to mark a student Excused for an absence AND include that information in the Roll Call Attendance report.  Secondarily, Roll Call allows you to take attendance for any given day, while our SIS has specific meeting days and times where attendance must be entered.  This has lead to data integrity issues where Roll Call has one date and our SIS another - resulting in an endless data cleanup initiative.  Even the best trained instructors can mark attendance on the wrong day, resulting in delays for important SIS activities, like financial aid disbursement, which is based off of attending at least one day of coursework in order to be considered 'enrolled'.

We are working on creating automated data audits and an automated integration using Azure Logic Apps, but would love to find a tool that fits both our LMS and SIS needs.

Any insights are welcome and appreciated!

Thank you!

Trevor

[Chris_Munzo]

aPlus Attendance is a third-party attendance tool that integrates with Canvas.  They are a Partner, so you can find more information by going to their Partner page here in the Community.

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

Hello @tcrandall ...

I don't have experience with third-party external tools/applications that might integrate with Canvas related to attendance, but I did a quick search using the keyword "attendance" on the EduAppCenter website, and I found the following:

• Edu App Center - BioMetric Signature ID
• Edu App Center - Proctortrack
• Edu App Center - SEATGEN

Again, I've never used any of these, so I don't know what their capabilities might be.  I also assume there would be a cost associated with these.  I'd also recommend researching the link that @Chris_Munzo gave you: Partner Listing: aPlus Attendance.

Also, there has been a long-standing Feature Idea request for a complete overhaul of the Attendance tool in Canvas.  You can find that link at: Attendance Overhaul.

I hope these extra resources will be of some help to you.  Good luck!