Attendance • Teaching with Courses • Iowa State University

Welcome! In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the attendance activity on your Moodle course site.

The attendance activity can be useful way to keep track of student attendance within the context of your course site. Advantages of using the attendance activity are that you will have no paper to lose or forget to bring to your class, and your students can keep track of their absences as the course progresses and not have to ask you about their attendance. This activity can also be used with multiple sections in one class.

Step 1: Enable Editing

Click “Turn editing on” at the top of the course site.

Step 2: Creating the activity

Click on “Add an activity or resource” at the bottom of the first block, or under the “News forum” at the top of your course page and select the “Attendance” activity.

With the next screen that pops up, choose your preferred grading method. For example, maybe you don’t want to assign a grade to attendance. In this case you would select “None” and the attendance activity will not appear or be connected in any way to Moodle’s gradebook. If you want to connect attendance to gradebook, if you use gradebook, you can choose to assign “points”. Also, if you have “groups” in your course site (e.g., for two sections), you can configure attendance to work with groups selecting by “Separate groups”. Click “Save and return to course” when you have your desired configurations set.

Step 3: Adding Sessions

Now the attendance activity should be located in the first block or week of your course page. To set up the activity to keep track of attendance for each class session please follow the following procedure:

-1 click on the attendance activity (the activity itself, not “Edit settings”), and

-2 choose the “Add” category

From here there are quite a few parameters that need to be set:

-1 check the “Create multiple sessions” box, (labeled “1” in red in the screenshot below)

-2 set the “Session dates” to start and finish at the beginning and end of the semester, respectively

-3 Time of day that the class meets

-4 Set “Duration” to the length of class meetings (e.g., 1 hour 20 minutes)

-5 Check the days of the week the class meets in “Session days”

-6 Keep “Frequency” at 1 because the class meets on a weekly basis.

-7 click “add” session at the bottom of the screen (not pictured below)

Step 4: Settings

From within the attendance activity, go to “Settings” and you will see the following screen for keeping track of attendance. You can manipulate the variables as you see fit in the “Action” column. Attendance categories can be deleted too. For example, if you want to get rid of the “Excused” absences category, you can simply click on the x in the “action” column.

Step 5: Taking attendance in class

When you click on “Sessions” you will see that you have sessions set up to keep track of attendance for the semester. When you are actually in class and want to take attendance, you will click on the green radio buttons seen in the screenshot below. (This screenshot has “All” selected to view all class sessions.)

You will then see something like what is pictured below, but a longer list. You can start by giving everyone in class a perfect score all at once by clicking P at the top left-most column, and then take that P away from students who are not present.

Step 6: Handling Multiple Sections in Attendance

You might have one attendance module set up for multiple sections of class. If this is the case, you can choose to view sessions for all sections, or choose to view sessions only for the relevant sections by clicking on the “sessions” drop-down menu and selecting your preference.

This idea is also applicable under reports for when you want to check the attendance of all your students.

For Support

If you encounter difficulty during any part of these tasks, please e-mail us at olt@iastate.edu for assistance, or stop by 306 Ross during our scheduled support hours.

If you cannot see the images in this documentation, click here.