Monitoring Attendance with Moodle

UNNC Language Centre (International Communications) (CN) (13-14)

Background

The Language Centre need to monitor students' attendance at the lectures and seminars for the UNNC Language Centre modules.

They requested the addition to moodle.Nottingham of the Attendance plugin, an admin tool to aid the submission of attendance records to School and Faculty offices more easily and accurately.  It allows you to create registers and mark students as Late, Present, Absent and Excused.

What they did

Used the Attendance Plugin in a central Language Centre Module

The attendance plugin can easily be added to any module and used for whole-cohort sessions or group sessions such as seminars.

How it worked

• It can be set up in advance
• At the beginning of a session the lecturer clicks the Take attendance (green circle) icon next to the relevant active session
• Students can be marked as Late, Present, Absent and Excused.

Tips and recommendations

• It works most easily if the plugin is used in each module and managed by the module convenor/lecturer, then the attendance record is reported to the relevant School or Faculty office.
• Using one attendance in a module for all the language modules by class groups is difficult to set up and manage
• It's possible for one person to set it up, the teacher to take the attendance in class, and then an administrative colleague to export the attendance record weekly or fortnightly  and work out the absent student list.
• Designing an Excel spreadsheet and appropriate macros to run on the exported data can make this attendance plugin fit with administrative processes.

Further information

Moodle Help Guides