Brightspace offers an attendance tracking feature, allowing you to monitor student participation. While this tool does not directly link to the gradebook, you can incorporate attendance into your grading by creating a gradebook item and manually entering grades to the gradebook item.
- To set up the attendance tracker, navigate to your course and either:
- Click More from the course navbar, then select Attendance from the dropdown menu, or
- Click Course Admin from the course navbar and then select the Attendance option under the "Learner Management" heading.
- Click More from the course navbar, then select Attendance from the dropdown menu, or
- From the "Attendance Register" page, initiate your tracker by selecting the New Register button.
- From the “New Register” page, enter a name, and a description if needed. Select "Default with Authorized Absent and Late" for the attendance scheme.
The grade scheme details are are available below for reference.
Symbol Status Full Name Assigned P Present 100% A Absent 0 AA Authorized Absent L Late 50%
- Set your cause for concern percentage threshold, which determines when attendance issues should be flagged
- To ensure students can view their attendance, select "Allow users to view this attendance register" under the "Visibility" section. Then, within the "Users" section, click the "Include all users in the course" radio button.
- In the "Sessions" section, add entries for each week the course is scheduled to meet. To add add more sessions, utilize the +Add Sessions option. You can specify an exact number of sessions to be added by entering a value in the field to the right.
- Click Save and close out.
- Once you save and close, your new attendance register will appear.
- To record attendance, click the name of the tracker you created.
- From the “Attendance Data” page, select the pencil calendar icon to the right of the session name, which opens the “Set Attendance Data” page.
- Record student attendance by updating the status with either:
- P (Present)
- A (Absent)
- AA (Authorized Absent)
- L (Late)
The course now has attendance tracking.
Important Note: Students cannot record their own attendance. Attendance needs to be manually entered by the instructor through Brightspace.