How to Take Attendance in uLearn

Owned by Union College (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Nov 29, 2021
4 min read

Follow these instructions to set up and take attendance in uLearn (Moodle).

There is a also a how-to video located here: How to Take Attendance in uLearn

Setting up Attendance

  1. Open your course in uLearn and click the “Turn editing on” button

  2. Click the plus sign to “Add an activity or resource” and choose Attendance. Generally, it is best to put the Attendance module at the top of the course in the same section as your syllabus. Please note that you only need to add one Attendance module for the course (not one for each week or class).

3. Open “Edit Settings” for the new Attendance module

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.

Taking Attendance

Follow these steps to take attendance for your course.

  1. Open the Attendance module

  2. 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.

  3. Set the date and click the “Add” button

  4. Click the “Take Attendance” button

5. Take the roll for you course and update the values for each student. Note that the following values are available by default. You can customize additional if needed (see below).

  • P - Present

  • L - Late

  • E - Excused

  • A - Absent

When you are finished, click the “Save attendance” button

Grade Calculation

The Attendance module calculates grades based on a scale rather than students starting at zero and earning attendance points for each course they attend. This can be counterintuitive if you are used to zero-based natural grading. Take the following example:

In this 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 based on a percent of the students' attendance to-date. In other words, they start with the full amount and lose points for classes not attended.

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, Student123 is “Absent” and Student456 is also “Absent”. Since Student123 has attended two out of three courses, they now have two-thirds of the maximum attendance points. Student456 has attended one out of three courses and now has one-third of the maximum points.

Conclusions

The Attendance modules scales the students attendance grade based on the number of classes that have taken place. This can be counterintuitive since to the method where students earn points for each class attended. However, the latter method is not supported by Moodle at this time.

We recommend making your students aware of how attendance grades are calculated so they know how to interpret their grade in 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 this is not an issue for final grades since all the classes will have taken place when final grades are submitted.

Attendance Statuses

The following Attendance Statuses are set up by default.

Default Values

Please note that you should think of the point values on a scale rather than actual points. For example, the default values would be:

  • Present - 100%

  • Late - 50%

  • Excused - 50%

  • Absent - 0%

You can modify these values as needed. It might make the most logical sense to set your scale based on 1. In the following example, students receive 100% for Present or Excused, and 10% off for being Late.

Please note that you can adjust these values mid-semester if needed and grades will automatically be recalculated.