Take Attendance in Moodle

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The Attendance tool in Moodle will help you take attendance, create graded events, and share them with your students. It is similar to creating a recurring meeting in Outlook or Google Calendar. For information beyond this article, please see Moodle documentation here.

Part I: Creating the Attendance Assignment

1. To begin setting up your attendance in Moodle, navigate to the course you would like to take attendance for. WIth edit mode on, click "Add an activity or resource".

Screenshot of the main course area in Moodle with "add and activity or resource" highlighted.

2. In the activity chooser window, select "Attendance".

Screenshot of the Moodle activity chooser with the Attendance activity circled.

3. You will be automatically redirected to the settings for your new Attendance activity. You may want to change the Name and Description text, under the General section.

Check the box below the Description text box if you would like the description to be displayed on the course page.

Screenshot of the Moodle attendance window with "Display description on course page" circled.

4. If you do not want to have attendance graded for your course, remember to set grade type to "None" under the grade tab. It is not possible to change the grade type for the attendance module once you have begun taking attendance for your course.

Screenshot of grade tab in the Attendance module with grade type set to "none."

5. Once you have configured the settings for the activity, scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Save and display".

Part II: Configuring Grading

1. Within your Attendance assignment, you can make edits to how students are graded. Click on the menu "More" and select "Status set".

2. Status Set will allow you to change the attendance types, points received for each status, and the availability of each status. See below for a breakdown of how that works.

Please note: Attendance assignments are defaulted to use the PLEA model for entering student attendance (Present: 2 points, Late: 1 point, Excused: 1 point, Absent: 0 points). If you want to change these, you can do so here. This must be changed before creating your sessions.
Acronym: This is shorthand name for each status, which will be shown when you are grading your students. For example, Present is "P", Absent is "A", etc.
Description: This is a description of the status. The defaults are PLEA, standing for Present, Late, Excused, and Absent.
Points: These are the points given for each status. Please change these to reflect how you would like to grade students who are present, absent, etc.
You can add another status by clicking "Add" at the bottom of the page.

Self marking ability: This setting will allow your students to grade their own attendance. If you would like to restrict that ability, please do so here.
Available before session start: This setting only applies to student-marked attendance. This will allow students to mark their attendance before the session start limit.
Automatically marked when not set: This setting only applies to student-marked attendance. You can select one of your statuses to automatically populate for that day if a student has not marked their attendance for that day.
Action: Hide or delete a certain status.

Part III: Configuring Attendance Sessions

1. To set up an attendance session, navigate to the Attendance assignment in your course. Click "Add session".

2. You will automatically be directed to the settings for this session. Under the section "Add session", select the time and date when you want this session to occur.

Date: We recommend setting the date to either the first day of class, or the date at which you want to start taking attendance.
Time: We recommend setting this time for the duration of your class period.
Description: You may add a description, although it is not necessary for standard attendance sessions. We recommend using this if you are creating a session for a special event.

3. Under the section "Multiple sessions", you may choose to have this session reoccur. This is will be especially useful if you would like to take attendance during every class period.

Repeat the session above as follows: Check this box if you would like this attendance period to reoccur. Setting the attendance period for the day and time of your class will be especially helpful here.
Repeat on: You can select the days of the week on which you want this attendance period to occur. For example, if you have a M/W/F class, select Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Repeat every: Use this setting if you do not want this attendance period to occur every consecutive week. If you would like these attendance periods to occur every week, leave this setting at 1.
Repeat until: Use this setting if you would like attendance sessions to continue until a certain date (ex. the end of a grading period, the last day of class, etc).

4. Under the section "Student recording", make any necessary selections for students recording their own attendance grades. Click "Add" at the bottom of the page when you are ready.

Allow students to record own attendance: Check this box only if you would like students to be able to mark themselves present, late, absent, etc. Students will only be able to mark for the statuses you made available in the Status Set page.
- If you allow students to mark their own attendance, this will open up two new settings options. One will allow students to edit their entry for the session after they have submitted it, and the other will allow you to open the attendance session earlier than the allotted period time.
Automatic marking: This will automatically give your students an attendance grade at the end of the session if they did not mark one themselves.

Part III: Grading Students' Attendance

1. To begin grading attendance, locate the session you would like to grade and select the "▶️" at the right-hand side under "Actions".

Sessions are sorted by date, with most recent sessions appearing at the bottom. If you are looking for a previous session, you may want to sort by time frame using the "Months/Weeks/Days" buttons at the right.

2. In the page for the session you would like to grade, there will be a list of students alongside the attendance selections. If you would like to set an attendance grade for all students at the same time, select that status from the gray bar pictured below.

The defaults statuses are PLEA, standing for Present, Late, Excused, and Absent.
Attendance sessions are by default split up into pages. If you would like to view or grade all students at the same time, select "Do not use paging" from the drop down menu under View Mode.

3. If you would like to grade a student individually, select the status you would like from the row beside their name. Once you are done grading, select "Save and show next page".

You can mark all of your students for a particular status and still make individual selections. This may be helpful in cases where only one or two students from a large class are late, absent, etc.
If you would like to add remarks for a specific student for that day, use the text box in the row beside their name. These remarks can be viewed by the students when they open the Attendance assignment.
Clicking a student's name will load their individual Attendance report.

4. Important Notes

The attendance from session can be edited by clicking the green arrow under "Actions".
Session settings can be edited by clicking the gear icon.
A session can be deleted by clicking the trash can icon.

If you would like to edit or delete multiple sessions at the same time, use the check boxes at the left of the sessions. Select actions from the drop-down menu at the right below the sessions.
Sort sessions by months, weeks, and days from the buttons at the right.