Automated Attendance for Internet Schools

[asergay]

Does anyone have a good online attendance solution? We don't believe the State of Ohio would accept Roll Call or New Analytics attendance tool data for online school attendance. (If you want to look the rule is here). There is a new product called Pulse that says it can provide the time on task data the state seems to require. Has anyone tried it?

So, some form of automated online attendance data is needed by every online school in Ohio, and I'm guessing all the other states. We are working on a way to get total time online using the web_log table in CD2, but even that is a rough estimate. This will only get to be a bigger issue as more online schools pop up. Instructure could make a whole lot of people happy if they could solve this problem.

Cheers-Alex

[ProfessorBeyrer]

Thank you @asergay for linking out to Ohio's ed code. I teach at the college level and am responsible for taking attendance, though only on a daily level and not the number of hours. And we generally do not have parents to report absences do, like my daughter's high school does to me. 

In my classes I take attendance by having students complete an activity. That enables me to count it as participation and thereby give points for their efforts. Mine is not very automated, however, as I have to look at the Google Slides my students edit during the breakout rooms and then note which students reported their attendance on a Google Sheet. Periodically I then record scores in the Canvas gradebook.

To make it more automated and use the tools that are built into Canvas, I suggest creating an attendance quiz or survey for each day the class meets. It could be a quiz/survey with a single question and might be useful to collect feedback or other relevant data from students.

I hope our colleagues in the Community share their answers to this important question.