Most instructors track attendance when possible. There are many reasons for it: for some of us it helps us learn our students’ names and faces. For others it leads to a participation grade. It also helps identify when a student stops showing up and might need assistance getting back on track.
Unfortunately, the tracking attendance feature in Canvas doesn’t get ported over into Aviso. Aviso has its own attendance tracking section. So why should you use the attendance feature in Aviso instead of Canvas?
Class attendance is a predictor of student academic success. Since Aviso helps track our advisees and is also the location where you submit alerts for your students and advisees, it makes sense that Aviso has some built in alerts that operate based on class attendance! Just like we have an automated alert that gets sent out when a student’s grade falls below a certain threshold or when the student hasn’t logged into the Canvas course for a number of days, we can set up an alert based on number of absences from classes. Heck, this is even better than tracking how long it has been since the student logged into Canvas (since a student might go a few days before logging in, depending on how you use Canvas with your face to face class).
Having attendance information available in Aviso means that when an advisor gets an alert, they can more quickly assess how wide spread an issue it is. Is your advisee struggling to attend all classes? Or are they just skipping one in particular? Just knowing that small detail can make a world of difference in how we reach out and support the student!
Yes, the bad news is that if you want to count attendance/participation towards the student’s grade in your class you’ll probably find yourself inputting attendance in both locations. I’d argue that if attendance is important enough to count for a grade in class then it’s worth tracking in Aviso too since it’s also important to their overall academic success here at Castleton!
For more information on how to take attendance in Aviso and about the related automated alerts, check out Kelley Beckwith’s email from last Thursday.
