How to take student attendance in your online class in Moodle?

Student Attendance is a part and parcel of every classroom. It is easier to take attendance in physical classroom but how you can take attendance in your online class in Moodle. In this article, we will learn about how you can take attendance and how students can see a summary of their attendance in the class.

Moodle LMS has a stable and popular plugin named – Attendance which allows you to take attendance in the Moodle course. You can install the Attendance activity plugin to your Moodle and after the administrator configures it, you can use it in your course as a teacher. Please read this guide to understand how to install a new Moodle plugin.

The attendance activity allows teachers to maintain a record of attendance, replacing or supplementing a paper-based attendance register. The teacher can track the attendance for each student and provide grades for the same.

As a teacher, you can mark the attendance status of a student as “Present”, “Absent”, “Late”, or “Excused”. These text strings are configurable and even additional strings can also be added. Adding the attendance activity in a Moodle course is a two step process – first, the activity is added and second the sessions needs to be set up for which attendance is to be tracked.

Taking student attendance in your online class in Moodle

An attendance activity can be easily added to your Moodle course like any other activity.

• Turn the Editing Mode on.
• Click “Add an activity or resource” button
• Choose – Attendance.
• Click Save Changes.

Adjusting the attendance descriptions

By default the Attendance activity will create a single status description with “Present”, “Absent”, “Late”, or “Excused” and points assigned for each of them. You can edit them by going to Attendance Activity > More > Status Set (click 1 in image below).

You can also add a completely new set of descriptors (click 2 in image below) with grade points, Available for students  & Automatically set when not marked etc.

Attendance activity

Adding attendance session

After configuring the activity, its time to add sessions. The attendance activity supports single session or multiple sessions. In the multiple session, you can specify the date and time for your class along with the frequency and finish date.

Taking Attendance

So after all the configuration steps, we are ready to mark the students attendance. You can take attendance for a session by clicking on the little Play icon on the session rectangle’s right-hand side. You can take attendance for each student thereafter. In case you want to mark all students as present, just click the P column on top.

The plugin also comes with handy features like students self-recording attendance capability and QR based attendance.

What are the other most useful Moodle Plugins which you are using for online teaching? Do share with us in the comments section below.