Many instructors may be searching for a way to keep track of student attendance within Canvas for their own use and/or for possible contact tracing.
In this article you will find:
- What is the Roll Call Attendance tool?
- How to view attendance
- How to Take Attendance
- Viewing the Attendance assignment
- How to manage graded attendance (and how to not grade attendance)
- How to export Attendance reports
What is the Roll Call Attendance Tool?
Canvas does have an attendance tool (an external app that is linked to Canvas) that you can turn on in Settings–> Navigation in your course. Simply drag the Attendance label where you want it to go in the Course Navigation bar order. The Attendance tool can be used for online or face-to-face courses.
The Attendance tool appears as a visible Course Navigation link, but it cannot be viewed by students. Students can view their own attendance report through the Roll Call Attendance submission details page.
View Attendance
With the Attendance tool, instructors can keep track of course attendance by taking roll electronically. Instructors can choose to view the tool in a list or grid format and can customize the placement of each student in the seating chart. Your roster will automatically populate in this tool, and you can drag and drop student names onto the seating chart layout grid.
Take Attendance
The status set for each student is associated with a percentage value. Statuses include present and on time, not present, late, and unmarked (excused absence).
View Attendance Assignment
When you take attendance using Roll Call, Canvas automatically adds Attendance as an assignment. The default point value for attendance is 100 points. To avoid Attendance calculation errors, never delete, rename, or unpublish the Attendance assignment.
Note: Although students cannot view the actual attendance tool, they can still view the attendance assignment in the Assignments page. This assignment cannot be hidden from students. However, you can keep them from getting grade notifications by changing the assignment to Manual Grading Policy in the Gradebook.
The Attendance tool also creates an assignment in the Gradebook and calculates attendance as a percentage of a student’s grade.
Graded Attendance
If you do not want Attendance to factor into the final grade:
- Go to Assignments
- Click Roll Call Attendance
- Click Edit Assignment Settings on the right hand side
- Choose do not count this assignment toward the final grade.
- Click Save.
If you do use as a Grade:
View Lateness Value
By default, the value of being late is 80% of the present value. So if a student is late, the student will receive 80% for the day instead of the full 100%. The late value can be adjusted in Roll Call settings.
View Gradebook Scores
In the Gradebook Attendance column, by default Canvas displays the assignment based on percentage of the point value. For instance, if the point value is 100, and roll call has been taken twice, a student with one present value (100%) and one lateness value (calculated at 80%) will have a score of 90 points, or 90%.
The Attendance Gradebook column will update every time you take roll call in the Attendance tool.
Note: Although students cannot view the actual attendance tool, if you are using attendance for grading, they can still view their attendance score in their Grades page and view their attendance report. You can prevent the assignment from triggering notifications by setting a manual posting policy for the assignment.
Export Attendance Reports
The settings cog in the upper right allows you to manage grade percentage and other settings and to print attendance reports.
