Taking attendance in the TeachCenter

The Attendance activity has been designed to enable teachers to record attendance and absence quickly and easily during a course. By default, you can choose between “Anwesend“ = Present, “Verspätet“ = Late, “Unentschuldigt“ = Unexcused or “Entschuldigt“ = Excused. Students earn points according to their status. However, teachers can also configure these status descriptions individually and add further options. For example, you can also enable students to enter their status independently before and during a course.

Students can see at any time how often they have already been absent and therefore get a good overview of their attendance. In addition, the recorded attendance and points can also be automatically calculated into the students’ grades.

Add this activity as any other activity or resource in your TeachCenter course:

• Use the Edit mode slider in the top right-hand corner and slide it to the right.
• Go to the section where you want to add the attendance activity, click Add an activity or resource.
• Select the activity Attendance.

  

   

• Adjust necessary settings such as grade or restrict access.
• Click Save and Display at the bottom.

Besides the tabs Attendance, Settings, and More, which will be discussed in more detail in the next subchapter, these are other selection options in the menu:

• Report: shows the attendances and absences of all students and can be used with different filters, e.g., all sessions, all past, weeks, summary

  

You can also display the attendances of specific groups if they exist in your TC course. If you want to contact students individually, tick off their names, scroll down, and click Send message.

• Import: Attendance lists in CSV format can be imported.
• Export: You can export the students’ attendances as an Excel file, Open Document or text file.

Once you have created the Attendance activity, you can add sessions.

• Go to Add Session.

• You can add a single or multiple sessions and add them either for all students or for a group.

Note: To set up an attendance list for specific groups, groups must exist in the TC course and a group mode must be activated.

• Add a name for the session under Description. If you leave the item for Description empty, the session will automatically be named Regular class session.
• In the subitem Student recording you can allow students to record attendance themselves. More information about this can be found in the section Individual adjustments > Allow students to record attendance independently.
• Click Add. All added sessions are displayed in a list.

• If you want to adjust the settings for sessions at a later point, click the gear icon next to the session, or the bin icon if you want to delete the session.

Open the Attendance activity in your TeachCenter course. You should now see the list of added sessions.

• Click the blue arrow (Take attendance) under Actions to the right of the desired session.

  

   

• The list of your students appears now.
• Set the status (to the right of every student).
• Each session needs to be recorded individually.

• If you have any additional remarks, you can enter them on the right, next to the Status set.
• Click Save and show next page. Once recorded, you can see a green arrow instead of a blue arrow next to the recorded session.
• If you want to adjust the attendance, click the green arrow to return to the recorded attendances.

  

Tip: You can also record the attendance of all your students at once: Open a session, set Set status for from "unselected" to "all" (above the list of students) and select the appropriate status.

You can still make manual adjustments for individual students afterwards. This is particularly recommended for large groups.

Export of attendances

To export the list of attendances after entering it, go to the Export tab. Select the desired information and format and click Export.

Import of attendances

To import attendances, the corresponding appointment must first be created. Inside of an appointment, the attendances of the participants can be imported from a file.

• To do this, go to Take attendance (triangle symbol) for the appointment you want to import attendances for.
• Click on Upload attendance by CSV.

  

• Upload the prepared CSV file that contains the email address, date and time of the appointment (DD-MM-YYYY hh:mm) and the status abbreviation (A, E, V, U).
• Assign the columns to the correct fields. For user ID, email must be selected.

  

Importing appointments

N.B.: The Import tab is only used to import (empty) appointments using a CSV file.

This CSV file may contain:

• Groups: Text, one or more groups with a separator (e.g. comma if the separator of the file is a semicolon)
• Date: date of the lesson, DD-MM-YYYY
• From: time in the format hh:mm
• To: time in the format hh:mm
• Description: text, can be used as the name for the lesson
• RepeatDay: weekday of the repetition, three-letter abbreviation (Mon, Tue, Wed)
• RepeatEvery: number, weekly interval (e.g. 2 for every 2 weeks)
• RepeatUntil: date in DD-MM-YYYY format

Upload the file in the Import tab, selecting the appropriate separator and encoding if necessary. After importing, the columns can be assigned to the correct fields.