Traditionally the attendance is a sign that a student participates in class activities. Students that are absent from school many times are labeled unserious, and no one can do anything to justify their poor results. As many schools adopt the blended learning method, student attendance tracking has proved to be less effective, unlike the traditional process of taking attendance. However, there are ways you can effectively monitor student attendance during online learning. In this article, we’ll talk about how you can effectively track your student’s online attendance.
Effective ways to track students attendance during online class
1. Attendance through logins
This method of tracking online attendance is effective if you use video conferencing platforms or webinar platforms to deliver your lecture. Students need to sign in with their username/email and password to access the online class. The system will automatically capture their names, and you’ll be able to know the students that attended the class and those that do not once the session is over. One advantage of this is that it is impossible to mark attendance for others.
However, tracking attendance through logins is not 100% trustable because a student can log in for only 5mins and it’ll still show in the attendance. Some webinars are trying to close the gap by providing the login time of every student that attended the class. You will have a clear picture of who stayed at the end of the lecture and dropped off.
2. Online polls
Students may be present in your online class but not necessarily in front of the system watching or listening to the lectures. It may be due to distraction in students’ environment or a student’s carefree attitude. To get every student’s attention during every online session, consider using an online poll in the middle of each lecture segment. The poll could last for some minutes, making it easier for you to know which student is present for the class.
The pool could form a basis of assessment for students during the class, thereby serving two purposes: first, tracking student attendance during online courses and, secondly, assessment.
3. Randomized question and answer sessions
Just like the online poll, the question and answer work similarly. It is a way to track if your students are all present in front of their screen participating in the lecture and not only marking attendance. Students can be very cunny; if you set questions and answers to the beginning of the class, they join in the behind and drop off. The same goes if you set it to the end, they’ll wait till when the lecture is going to be over before they log in. What you should do is putting a random question like 2-3 times within the session. The main aim is to encourage students to have a solid network to prevent them from dropping off during the lecture.
4. Virtual roll calls
Roll call is used in traditional classroom lectures by the lecturer. The method can also help track student attendance during online learning. It is a way the lecturer calls students who have enrolled for the course one after the other, and student answers present. However, the major drawback to this method of tracking student attendance is that the lecturer uses part of their lecture time for manual roll call. There is also the possibility of students logging off after the manual roll call. To use this method effectively, you can wait until the middle or the end of your lecture before starting the virtual roll calls.
5. Feedback forms
A feedback form is an excellent way to track students’ attendance. In this case, students fill a self-reporting form that states that they are present for a particular class. Only students that sign in for the course are sent the form. And it is effective for webinars and podcasts. If you want detailed information about whether a student participated in the online class, you can add additional questions about what was taught in the class. For instance, what is your general overview of the topic taught today? It is a short question that can expose the students that are not present in the class.
6. Student attendance tracking software
Many software is being developed to track student’s attendance during online learning. The student on their preferred device installs this app. The app creates an individual profile for each student, and it tracks the categories they logged into with the amount of time spent in each course. One good side to look at about this type of software is that it does practically all the tracking. All you need to do is to generate the data at the end of each semester.
