Attendance system

Summary

This is an easy to use attendance tool, aimed at covering the basic needs for taking attendance. Teachers take attendance (present or absent) on calendar events, which makes it easy to follow for both teachers and students. Designated attendance managers have access to all attendance, and can quickly follow up on individual student absence, and see if attendance is being kept on schedule. The attendance manager can also export attendance for safe keeping or for further analytics.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Summary
• Getting Started
  • Enable the attendance system on a site:
  • Select who should be attendance managers
  • Select the default set-up when creating a new course
  • Integrations
• Teachers
  • Set-up (optional)
    • Enable attendance reporting for the course
    • Create timetable
    • Note!
  • Taking attendance
    • Calendar
    • Overview of attendance for a course
    • Changing attendance for an event
    • Removing attendance for an event
    • View attendance for a single student
  • Student self-registering presence
• Students
  • View their attendance
  •  Self registering presence
• Attendance managers
  • Course  overview
  • Course details
  • Detailed view for a student in a course
  • Exporting Attendance
    • Improved overview for Attendance managers
    • Attendance export updates
    • Get an overview of the total attendance information directly in the students profile card.
    • Filter export on date
    • View courses where attendance has not been enabled
    • Other minor improvements
  • Absence percentage
    • Partial absence
• Date filters on attendance reports

Getting Started

Enable the attendance system on a site:

1. Log on as System admin
2. Go to Admin > Edit global settings > Features and security and enable Attendance system

Teachers will now have the possibility to take attendance for their course (which can be toggled in Course > Settings > Course properties and features)

Select who should be attendance managers

1. Log on as System admin
2. Go to Admin > Profiles and click Edit on the profile
3. Enable Attendance manager and select if access should be given on a Site or School level
   1. Site: Attendance manager will see attendance for all courses on the site
   2. School: Attendance manager will see attendance for courses on schools in which the user has a Teacher or Admin role.
4. Click Save
   

Create a policy if you want only selected users to have this permission, and assign this to individual users:

1. Log on as System admin
   
2. Go to Admin > Policies and click Add Policy
   
3. Name the policy, select to allow Attendance manager and select if access should be given on a Site or School level
   
   1. Site: Attendance manager will see attendance for all courses on the site
      
   2. School: Attendance manager will see attendance for courses on schools in which the user has a Teacher or Admin role.
      
4. Click Save
   
5. Select Individual users next to the newly created policy, and add the users.

Users who have Attendance manager permission, will see a menu item for Attendance appear in the Admin menu. Read more on Attendance managers below.

Select the default set-up when creating a new course

1. Log on as System admin
2. Go to Admin > Edit global settings > Set default course settings and chose to have Attendance reporting on or off by default.

If it is set to on, new courses will have attendance reporting enabled. If set to off, new courses will have this off. The setting does not apply to existing courses. 

If courses have been created with attendance disabled, there are two options for taking attendance:

• Educators can manually enable attendance reporting for their courses
• Create a course template where only attendance report is enabled, and apply the template to the selected courses
  
  

Integrations

The attendance timetable can be set up via integrations. Calendar events can be created through the Organization API (https://developer.itslearning.com/Working-with-calendar-events.html).

Teachers

Set-up (optional)

Enable attendance reporting for the course

To take attendance for a course, you need to first ensure that Attendance reporting is enabled.

1. Go to Course > [...] Menu choose Settings

2. Under "Manage course setting", choose Course Properties and features

3. Ensure that the Attendance reporting is enabled

Create timetable

Attendance is taken on calendar events. Calendar events can either be automatically set up from an integration, or events can be manually created.

1. Go to Calendar
2. Select Add event, or click at the appropriate time in the calendar view
3. Select to create an individual event, or a recurring event
4. Ensure Take attendance for this event is enabled (enabled by default if course has attendance enabled)
5. Click Save.

Tip 1! Create the timetable after enabling attendance reporting for the course. "Take attendance for this event" will be automatically selected.

Tip 2! Events created through the API will always have "Take attendance for this event" enabled, to ensure that the timetable is set up for attendance tracking.

Tip 3! If you're using course groups, it is also possible to assign events to these groups. Attendance will then only be taken for the members of the groups. 

Note!
Once attendance has been taken for an event, it will not be possible to change the course or course groups associated with the event.

Taking attendance

Taking attendance is quick and easy, so teachers are able to take attendance at the beginning of the lesson.

Attendance opens 15 minutes before the event starts, and there are several ways to start taking attendance:

Click on the attendance icon to open the Take attendance window:

By default, all students will be marked as present, so the teacher only need to mark absent students. It is also possible to take partial absence, in case the student is only participating in parts of the lesson, by setting the number of missed minutes.

Once saved, the attendance icon will change to reflect the status:

29/2 means 29 students present and 2 absent.

Calendar

The calendar gives the teachers a good overview of their events together with the status of the attendance. The attendance icon will indicate:

• Events where attendance has not been taken
• Present/Absent-indicator of attendance for an event
• Events that are excluded (for courses where attendance is normally taken)

Simply click the attendance button to start taking attendance, or to make changes.

Overview of attendance for a course

Teachers can find an overview of attendance for their course in the Reports menu in the course (Course > Reports > Attendance). Here, the most recent events are shown first, and the teacher can go back in time to find earlier events.

Mar 5, 2025 Attendance report can be filtered by date. When filtered, the table includes events from the date range and total absence is recalculated using the events from the selected time period. 

Changing attendance for an event

There are two ways to change attendance for an event.

1. Open the "Take attendance" dialog, and change the present state of the student, or
2. Change the event by clicking the corresponding cell in the attendance overview in courses

Removing attendance for an event

Teacher can remove all attendance for an event:

1. Go to Course > Reports > Attendance
2. For the event that should be removed, click the dropdown icon on the column header, and choose "Remove all attendance". Attendance is now removed for all participants.

View attendance for a single student

Teachers can view detailed attendance records for students in their courses. From the attendance overview page, click on a student to get to the detailed view. Here, the teacher can see the overall average, and status for each event. The teacher can also change attendance for an event on this page.

(As of March 5, 2025) Attendance report can be filtered by dates. When filtered, the total absence is automatically recalculated for the selected time period.  

Student self-registering presence

It is possible for teachers to allow their students to self-register their presence. This will be particularly useful in higher education situations where there are many students, and they can be trusted to self-register their presence.

In short:

1. Help teachers save time by allowing students to self-register presence.
2. Students must be in the classroom to register presence through a time-limited registration code
3. It is easy for the teacher to configure this
4. It is be quick for students to register
5. It allows for students that are late to also register (if teacher allows)
6. It will not require access to specific devices or hardware for students to register their presence, just be able to login to itslearning
7. The teacher can override the student's registration

When teachers have the "Attendance" modal window open, teachers get the option to open up for students to register themselves as present. For courses where attendance is being taken, teachers can choose between taking attendance themselves, or let the students register their own presence. This can be done on an event level as needed.

When an even has self-registering of absence enabled, teachers get the option to open a new tab with a code students can use for registering their own presence. The code can then be displayed for example on a projector or monitor. The code changes every 30 seconds. This is to reduce the chance for issues like a student takes a picture of the code and sends to a friend.

Students go to their calendar or any other place in itslearning showing the event, open the current event, click "Register Presence", and enters their code. They will now be set as present for the ongoing event. Teachers will see presence and absence as normal when viewing absence for their course.

Teachers can decide on an event and a course level if self-registering should be used. This can be configured pr event, and the default can be specified under the "Attendance reporting" section of course settings. 

Wondering about the workflow? This final picture shows this step-by-step (Click to enlarge):

Students

View their attendance

Students can find their attendance information from the top right-hand menu.

The first screen will show the courses they are attending which are tracking attendance.

Clicking on a course will open the detailed report for the course
(As of March 5, 2025) Attendance report can now be filtered by dates. When filtered, the total absence is automatically recalculated for the selected time period.

Self registering presence

This is only available for events where the teacher has decided that students should register their presence. Students go to their calendar or any other place in itslearning showing the event, open the current event, click "Register Presence", and enters their code. They will now be set as present for the ongoing event. Teachers will see presence and absence as normal when viewing absence for their course.

Attendance managers

Attendance managers can access the attendance information from Admin > Attendance.

Course  overview

Here, the attendance manager can see an overview of all the courses where Attendance reporting has been enabled (archived courses are not included).

In the column for Registered attendance, the admin can see if attendance is being kept for the course or not.

6 of 29 means that of the 29 events that have been taught so far, attendance has been taken for only 6 events.

A "taught" event, is an event that is marked for attendance keeping, and has passed in time. 

Course details

Clicking on a course will open the overview page for that course. The attendance manager have the same capabilities as the teachers, and can take and change attendance, and view detailed attendance for a student. The attendance manager can also see who the teacher is for a course.

Detailed view for a student in a course

The attendance manager can zoom in on a student in a course, to see all attendance recorded for this student. The attendance manager has the option to change attendance on this page, by clicking on the event that should be changed.

Exporting Attendance

Attendance managers can export all the attendance by clicking the Export button in the upper right corner. Once started, you the export status can be seen on the page. Once the export is completed, a download-link will be provided.

When clicking the Export-button, a new export is started. The export may take a while to make ready. The attendance manager can navigate away and check the progress at any time.

The Download file button becomes active when the export is ready:

Improved overview for Attendance managers

The overview page showing courses have been improved for attendance managers, to enhance the certainty that teachers are taking attendance on a regular basis;

• A new "Attendance taken percentage" that indicates how up-to-date the teacher is with taking attendance (based on the Lessons given vs Lessons tracked) 
• Sorting on all columns, sorted by default on the name of the course
• Paging to reach all the courses the attendance manager can view (will only be displayed if there are more than 100 courses in the list)

Attendance export updates

The attendance export has been updated with the following changes:

• Organisation Title
• Organisation Sync Key
• Total minutes given RENAMED to "Registered attendance"
• Events until now (Added) which shows the minutes for events until now

This will help the the attendance manager analyse the absence in more detail. The Events until now was added to indicate the accuracy of the "Absence Percentage", by relating "Events until now" with "Registered attendance". A big difference in these numbers will indicate that not all events have been correctly registered (e.g. only 3 out of 24 events have been tracked), which will give an inaccurate absence percentage.

Get an overview of the total attendance information directly in the students profile card.

Attendance across all courses is available directly from the students profile card (Teacher can view courses they are teaching).

Filter export on date

Attendance managers can now choose the dates to include in the export.

View courses where attendance has not been enabled

Attendance managers have a good overview of the courses where attendance is being tracked, and also if attendance tracking is up-to-date. With the additional filter, attendance managers can also see the courses where attendance is not enabled yet. This will give the attendance managers a full overview and control to ensure that all courses that should track attendance have it enabled, and to follow-up if teachers are not taking attendance on a regular basis. 

Other minor improvements

• A label describing the difference between Site and School is now shown when enabling attendance manager for a profile; 'Site' allows users to see attendance for all courses and course participants on the site, while 'School' limits visibility to courses and course participants in their schools. Users need to be an Administrator or Teacher in the site or school hierarchy.

    Note!

• The exported package is only available for 24h. After that, it will be deleted permanently.
• Starting a new export will overwrite earlier exported packages.

Absence percentage

The absence percentage for a student in a course is calculated on the fly. The calculation is based on the events that has been kept up till now, and does not take future events into account. If the report is filtered by dates, then calculation is based on the events within the selected time period.

Absence percentage = (number of minutes absent) / (number of minutes given) %.

• Number of minutes absent is the sum of minutes from all events where the student was absent (also taking partial absence into account).
• Number of minutes given is the sum of minutes from all events recorded for this student. Records marked as Not set are not included.
  

Partial absence

Partial absence means that a student was absent for parts of the event (e.g. 1h in a 4h lesson). In the absence percentage calculation, the missed minutes are counted as absent minutes, while the remaining time is calculated as present.

Partial absence is marked with a hourglass-icon. The number of minutes partially tracked is written below the image. If student was absent the entire lesson, minutes are not shown.

Date filters on attendance reports

As of March 5, 2025, all attendance reports can be filtered by dates. This will help teachers and admins to track attendance on courses that run over multiple semesters.

Give date filters are used, then

• Report tables only show events from the selected time period.
  • If user enters start date, but no end date, then filter the attendance report from start date to today.
  • If user enters end date, but no start date, then filter the attendance report from first event to given date.
• Total absence percentage is recalculated using only the events from the selected time period.
• Total absence minutes and total registered minutes is recalculated using only the events from the selected time period (individual student reports).

By default, reports are shown without date filtering.