Follow these instructions to set up and take attendance in uLearn (Moodle).
Setting up Attendance
Open your course in uLearn and click the “Turn editing on” button
Click the plus sign to “Add an activity or resource” and choose Attendance. Generally, it is best to put the Attendance resource at the top of the course in the same section as your syllabus. Please note that you only need to add one Attendance resource for the course (not one for each week or class).
3. Open “Edit Settings” for the new Attendance resource
4. Set the Maximum Grade to the amount that attendance is worth for your course. Click the “Save and Display” button.
Please note that if attendance is not counted toward students’ grades then you can set Type to “None”.
Make sure to set your Maximum Grade value correctly since it cannot be changed once you begin taking attendance.
5. In the Attendance resource, open the “Status set” tab. On this screen, you will define the point values for each attendance status - Present, Late, Excused, Absent, as well as any custom values you wish to create.
You will calculate these values to enter by dividing the total number of classes by the total number points for attendance. For example, if attendance accounts for 200 points of a student's grade and there are 20 classes in the semester then each class would be worth 10 points.
Taking Attendance
Follow these steps to take attendance for your course.
Open the Attendance resource.
Click “Add session” tab. Please note, you can create the session at the time of the course or you can create all your session ahead of time - whichever you prefer.
Set the date and click the “Add” button
Click the “Take Attendance” button
5. Take the roll for you course and update the values for each student. When you are finished, click the “Save attendance” button
Grade Calculation for Attendance
The following is an explanation of how grades are calculated by the Attendance resource in uLearn. Take the following example:
For our test course, attendance is worth 200 points of the total grade and there are 20 session. Thus each class is worth 10 points.
Class 1
In Class 1, Student123 is “Present” and Student456 is “Absent”. Note that Student123 has 200 points in the gradebook. This is because attendance grading scales percent-wise based on the students' attendance to-date.
Class 2
In Class 2, Student123 is “Present” again and Student456 is “Present”. Note that Student123 still has 200 points (100% of the total classes to-date). Student456 now has 100 points (50% of the classes to-date).
Class 3
In Class 3, Student 123 is “Absent” and Student456 is also “Absent”.
Conclusions
The Attendance resource scales the students attendance grade based on the number of classes to-date. This can be counter-intuitive since another method would be for students to earn one class worth of points for each class attended. However, that method is not supported by Moodle at this time.
We recommend making your students aware of how attendance grades are calculated so they are aware when looking at the Gradebook.
You may also find it appropriate to adjust your midterm grades to the total attendance points earned to-date. If so, you would need to make this calculation manually before entering the midterm grade into My Union. Note that there is not an issue for final grades since all the classes will be over at that point.