Rethinking Attendance for Remote Teaching
Note: This page was originally written during COVID restrictions, although many of the principles remain relevant. We have removed some COVID-specific language, but be aware of the original context for this page. You may also view our more general page on attendance.
Attendance in online environments looks quite different than what we are used to—whether we are talking about a fully online course, a hybrid one, or a situation where we need to accommodate students who are unable to attend class for medical or other reasons. Not only do you want your attendance policies to makes sense within your teaching context, but you also want to avoid inadvertently encouraging students to come to class ill or when they have legitimate reasons for attending class virtually.
Think engagement vs attendance
Typically, fully online or remote courses focus more on engagement than they do attendance, and you may have to shift your thinking in this way during remote teaching. Even if you choose to have a synchronous (real-time) class meeting via Zoom, there are a lot of legitimate reasons students wouldn’t be able to participate live, and we encourage instructors to remain flexible during times of crisis. Consider what students can do to demonstrate that they engaged with a class recording and are participating in the course.
Depending on the nature and size of your class, you might consider short engagement activities for each lesson you plan. That might be a short comprehension quiz, or a Classroom Assessment Technique (CAT) that allows students to reflect on their learning and give you some feedback about how they are doing. If you already use Canvas discussions or Piazza, consider using those tools for getting students to engage with one another online, marking those students as “present” once they engage with a group discussion online.
These engagement approaches are also useful in hybrid courses where students may be watching remotely. How are you ensuring their engagement or participation in the class? Those short reflection/application activities not only can provide you with attendance information, but they also promote learning more than a mere roll call can.
Technical tools for recording attendance
If you use Zoom for live sessions, you can get a report of all individuals who participated in a meeting: Log into http://zoom.iu.edu and look for the Reports link on the left menu bar. Three caveats: First, and most importantly, consider options for students who cannot make a live session, especially during a crisis. Can they watch a recording and do some sort of engagement activity later? Second, if students call in via phone, only their phone number is listed in the logs. Third, make sure they log in to Zoom using their IU credentials (SSO), so you will know who they are; more at https://kb.iu.edu/d/aodv.
If you provide class recordings in Kaltura, you can get detailed viewer analytics about who watched the videos, and for how long. If you upload your Zoom recordings into Kaltura for delivery, this view tracking could be a good alternative to “live attendance,” especially if paired with a short engagement activity.
We recommend people not try layering technologies for attendance, like using TopHat (typically an in-class polling tool) to take attendance during a live Zoom meeting. That is just more of a technical/logistical hassle for you, and it adds more cognitive and emotional overhead for students in a time of crisis, impacting their ability to learn. If you are using TopHat for other reasons, great, but adding it only for attendance can be more of a problem than a benefit.
Unfortunately, these technical solutions tend to be disconnected from one another. Zoom data are separate from Kaltura data, which are not integrated into the Canvas Attendance tool or gradebook. Unless all of your students are participating via the same tool, your attendance data will be scattered across those tools. So, one benefit of using a short engagement activity in Canvas is that you would have all that information in your gradebook.
Some notes on attendance
Whether you call it attendance or engagement data, you will still need to keep track of this information for financial aid purposes. In online courses, this is often the last date a student was active in the course Canvas site, but you can also use an engagement activity or Zoom/Kaltura data for these purposes.
Main takeaways
- Consider finding ways to track engagement rather than attendance; they help with learning, too.
- Be flexible with students during difficult times, giving them different ways to engage with your course.
- Don’t over-engineer your attendance/engagement approaches.