Summary
Using the Attendance feature in Moodle you’re able to keep an electronic record of student attendance at various sessions. Once you have set up a session (with a group of students if relevant) you can mark whether a student was present, late, an explained absence or just absent.
Setting up Attendance
You may want to set up difference Attendance modules for different things – in Home courses for example you might have different ones for Pathology, Clinical Skills and Integrated Cases to keep things clearer for tutors.
- Log in to Moodle and navigate to your course.
- Make sure Edit mode is turned on (Turn editing on – top right hand corner of Moodle).
- Click the Add an activity or resource link in the area where you want the attendance feature to appear.
- Select Attendance from the list and click Add.
- Give the item a name, description and any other settings that may be important.
- Think about if students should be able to see the item or not – you can change this in the Common Module Settings area.
- Click Save and display when you’re happy with those settings.
Creating Sessions
- Once you have set up Attendance you will need to add sessions – open your Attendance Module by clicking on it.
- Click Add session from the tabs at the top.
- Select the groups of students that should attend the session (if applicable) and give it a date, time and description. You can also choose to have the session repeat. Click Add when you’re finished.
Taking Attendance
- Once you have the Attendance module and sessions set up click the Attendance Module to open it up take attendance.
- Find the session you want to take attendance for from and click the green circle from the Action column.
- Now set the status for each student – you can use the top row to set the same status for all students and then update the wrong ones to speed things up.
- Once you’re finished click Save attendance at the bottom of the page.
