Faculty: Taking Attendance in Canvas

In Canvas, there is an attendance tool. It is called Roll Call.

This tool is handy for taking attendance during face-to-face meetings for Canvas enhanced courses, or required meetings of hybrid courses. It also has a built in seating chart and allows you to create badges to visually mark student behavior in a class.

See this document for instructions on using Attendance/Roll Call.

For Online and Hybrid courses, here are alternate methods for taking attendance using assignments, participation and analytics. Instructors should provide clear instructions on how students are to participate and be counted as attending the course. For example,
"Students must have logged in and actively participated in an academically related activity to be counted as attending this course."

1. Create a weekly (or daily if desired) mechanism for documenting student participation. These weekly mechanisms can be a graded discussion board assignment, submitting/completing a graded assignment in Canvas, or communicating with the instructor via conversations. 
2. Set an an assignment where students must post a weekly reflection to show they have completed the content.
3. If you require students to log in to your course a minimum number of times, in addition to posting that information on your syllabus, set up a one question quiz that is confirmation of attendance fora minimum number of days. You would need multiple quizzes, so this might be time consuming.
4. Here is a sample set up scenario:
• Create 10  - one question quizzes called Attendance 1-10
• The 1-multiple choice question is "Did you attend class today?"
• Only one answer: Yes
• Restrict each quiz to 12:00 AM - 11:59 PM for that one day.
  
• Randomly take attendance 10-times throughout the semester.
5. Another option is a daily discussion board that requires student participation with start/end dates from 12:00 AM - 11:59 PM on the same day.
6. Use a Google survey, which can be embedded in your Canvas Course
7. Use Analytics! In Canvas, student course activity can be viewed via analytics. You can see see how much content they've accessed, how long they stayed on each page, etc. Take this with a grain of salt as you can't guarantee that they are really contemplating the content or that they just clicked on it. Overall it is a good way to tell if a student even clicked on something.
8. Use an Excel file to track student attendance.  Download the Excel file and store it on an external drive (i.e. thumb drive, hard drive).  Open the file, record the attendance, save the updated file.

Additional Analytics instructions

• What are Analytics for my course?
• How do I view Analytics for a course?
• What will Analytics tell me about my course?
• How do I view Analytics for a student?
• What will Analytics tell me about my student?

Additional instructions from the Canvas Instructor Guide on how to use the Roll Call attendance tool in Canvas.

• How do I configure the Roll Call Attendance tool for my course?
• How do I take attendance using Roll Call?
• How do I use Roll Call Badges?
• How is Roll Call Attendance graded in Canvas?
• How do I create a seating chart using Roll Call?
• How do I run Roll Call Attendance reports for my course?