[Announcements] [Building Sakai] New Tool: Attendance

[Adam Marshall]

We had a discussion about this sort of thing with Medical Sciences the other day.

What they were after was an attendance system whereby the students could sign themselves in and not be able to do it from home or get a friend to do it for them. We thought of using Near Field Communication which should be available in smartphones pretty soon.

adam

From: sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org [mailto:sakai-dev-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Bryan Holladay
Sent: 08 February 2011 21:45
To: announcements at collab.sakaiproject.org; Sakai-Dev Dev
Subject: [Building Sakai] New Tool: Attendance

Everyone,

We are putting together some specifications and designs for a new tool that will track student's attendance, partially sponsored by some of Longsight's clients. The idea is to have a simple table that lists each day the class meets where a teacher can insert in attendance records for each student (see below (or attachment) for a crude mockup).  I've heard there's been some interest in the community for a tool like this and it would be great to get the community involved. I'm hoping to get input from everyone about any ideas or features they'd like to see. Also, any collaboration with design, UI, coding, or internationalization would help a lot. I've set up a wiki page where anyone can contribute input/ideas or sign up to help: https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/ATTEND/Home

Here are some quick ideas for specifications:
                *               Show a listing of dates (similar to a calendar, but in a spreadsheet-like format, rather than a monthly calendar-style view, and with the students names listed in one column on the left)
                *               Have the ability to select only certain days of the week for viewing as the default for a particular site (for example, Mondays and Wednesdays only, if it is a M-W class)
                *               Enter an attendance mark for each student for each date the class meets, such as P (present), A (absent), T (tardy), E (excused), H (holiday), etc.
                *               Listing would be sortable by name, or specific date column
                *               Students displayed could be filtered by group or section
                *               Allow faculty to export and/or print the attendance data for offline-line record keeping if needed
                *               Allow students to access the tool and view ONLY their own attendance data for that class

Additionally, it would be really great if:
                *               Faculty had a place where they could define the start and end dates of class for that term
                *               There were a way to tabulate the number of absences per user and record it somewhere easily visible to faculty and students
                *               The instructor could choose to assign points for attendance, and this data could be (optionally) linked to the gradebook to give an overall attendance score


Even if you are unable to contribute, it would be nice to know the interest level within the community for this tool, so please reply with your thoughts or add comments to the confluence page.


Thanks,
Bryan Holladay
The Longsight Group LLC

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