Class Attendance

Summary

This article will discuss how to create Meeting Times for a class, and the two types of Attendance tracking available in Align: 

• Class Meeting Times
• Online Work

Contents

1. Create Class Meeting Times
2. Class Meeting Time Attendance
3. Online Work Attendance
4. Class Attendance View by Week

Create Class Meeting Times

Before you are ready to take attendance for a Class, you will need to set up meeting times. You can either create an On Campus or Online meeting time. To set up Class Meeting Times, follow these steps:

1

Navigate to the Class Dashboard 

2

Click 'New Time Slot'

3

Fill in the fields to determine when and where your meeting time will happen. 

Note: Rooms need to be added to your system for On Campus meeting times. If you haven't already set up rooms for your school, learn more in the Room Management article.

Class Meeting Time Attendance

Attendance for Classes with Meeting Times can be recorded one of three ways: 

• Checking in Using a hardware solution for checking in students to classes, or
• Joining a scheduled meeting by clicking the link to join an online hosted live class or on-demand video class.
• Manually take attendance through the Attendance Page page for the class time. 

Class Attendance by Week

Viewing Class Attendance

The location for online attendance can be found at the Class level.  

1

First, navigate to the Class Dashboard

2

Next, Attendance link 

3

Finally, navigate to the calendar week you want to view

Taking / Editing Class Attendance

Online Work Attendance

Back to Top

Attendance for Online Classes works differently to normal On-Campus classes where you have students checking into classes using hardware tracking solutions.

Online Attendance is taken for a class when a student performs qualifying attendance actions within Align. Online attendance is tracked daily which means if a student performs a qualifying action on the system for that day, then the system logs online attendance for that day.  Online attendance is modelled off the Title 4 Guidelines (a 1500 page book - good bedtime reading!). This translates in Align to the following actions recording online attendance in the system:

1. An Assignment is submitted. When you submit an Assignment for a Class, online attendance will be recorded
2. Joining a Scheduled Meeting, or viewing a past meeting with an on-demand video link. For example, a Live Zoom meeting, or archived meeting link to watch/join that meeting.  Note: Align does not currently track if the student stays watching that content or continues to participate in an online meeting.
3. Viewing a Lesson when working through the content in a Class
4. Inbox Replies to an Instructor’s message.

Title 4 Guidelines

The Federal-Aid Student Handbook outlines the requirements for online class attendance. The following summary is an extract from Section 5-65 of those guidelines:

Documenting attendance when students are enrolled in distance education courses In a distance education context, documenting that a student has logged into an online class is not sufficient, by itself, to demonstrate academic attendance by the student. A school must demonstrate that a student participated in class or was otherwise engaged in an academically related activity. Examples of acceptable evidence of academic attendance and attendance at an academically related activity in a distance education program include: -  student submission of an academic assignment, - student submission of an exam, - documented student participation in an interactive tutorial or computer-assisted instruction, - a posting by the student showing the student’s participation in an online study group that is assigned by the institution, - a posting by the student in a discussion forum showing the student’s participation in an online discussion about academic matters, and Volume 5—Withdrawals and the Return of Title IV Funds 2019–2020 FSA HB September 2019 Glossary CFR DCL 5–66 - an email from the student or other documentation showing that the student initiated contact with a faculty member to ask a question about the academic subject studied in the course