[Building Sakai] New Tool: Attendance

[Matthew Jones]

Attendance seems like a tough subject. I never had a college class that
required attendance though I had some friends that did. Taking attendance
for adults on something they're paying for seemed silly to me. If students
don't attend class they'll probably do poorly on the exams, so go to the
classes. It's of benefit to students, right?

The best way for an instructor to *take* attendance was to have random or
frequent pop quizzes. (even if they were trivially easy) While I say I never
had a professor that took attendance, I did have a few that did this. :/

On the subject of this system, IP address logging/filter doesn't seem that
useful because it can be tricky to get all the correct address ranges at
some campuses (it was for me to try to setup a firewall) and with VPN and
proxy servers you have to figure out what to do with those.
Students/staff/faculty can even often setup their own proxy servers. There
would probably be more ways to cheat it if someone *really* wanted to.

I think the idea of an instructor giving students a code they enter would be
easier. At the start of class instructor signs in, gets a code. Says "Class
please sign in with the attendance tool with this 4 letter/digit code". Sure
that could be communicated via twitter/chat or something with someone
sitting outside class, but this would be at least as good as a student says
"Here" when called on for another student.

While I'm not sold on the requirement of attendance as a contributor to the
grade, an attendance system could be useful if you see a student is getting
a poor grade and you can also see that they have poor attendance. It could
also be used by other researchers at a university look for other problems
such as how weather might affect attendance (could instructors/students get
in with the snowstorm) or if there is some flu outbreak.

As far as implementation, I also agree that this sounds like something that
should be setup externally and work through BasicLTI. A service like this
would be useful outside of Sakai.

-Matthew

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 11:40 AM, csev <csev at umich.edu> wrote:
>
> - Have IP address logging and an IP address filter
> - Have an optional secret that would be communicated to the class to unlock
> it for students
> - Integration into the Gradebook based on instructor controlled settings.
>
> It should take be a few days on Google App Engine and then it would work in
> Moodle, ATutor, etc as well as Blackboard since it is Basic LTI :)
>
> Of course it is a bit of an experiment so I am not suggesting that you
> change direction in any way - but as I build it, I will add commentary to
> your confluence page.
>
> /Chuck
>
> On Feb 8, 2011, at 4:44 PM, Bryan Holladay wrote:
>
> 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
>
> <Screen shot 2011-02-02 at 3.00.04 PM2.png>
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