Taking Attendance in Blackboard (faculty)

Faculty are encouraged to track in-person attendance with the Blackboard attendance tool. This article outlines the steps for tracking attendance in Blackboard.

Problem

To facilitate contact tracing, faculty will need to take attendance in class to record which students attend class in person.  Blackboard has an attendance tool that allows instructors to track course attendance for each class meeting.  Here are the steps to take attendance in Blackboard.

Environment

Blackboard (faculty)

Resolution

1. In your Blackboard course, go to Course Tools > Attendance.

2. The first time you access the attendance tool, click on Add Attendance in the center of the screen.
3. When the attendance window opens, you will see a Settings option the first time you open it.  If you count attendance towards your course grade, you can adjust the point value or percentages for attendance here.  Click Save to save your settings.
4. To take attendance for the day, click on the appropriate box for each student:  Present, Late, Absent or Excused.

Important:  To facilitate contact tracing and distinguish which students attended in person, it is recommended that you use Present to track those who attended in person and Excused to track those who attended remotely.  Be sure to let your students know this, so they don’t think they are being marked down or graded differently for attending remotely.  In the Grade Center, Excused is counted with the same value as Present.

To see an overall summary of your class attendance, click on the Overall button in the upper right corner.  From here, you will see several options:

At the top of the screen, you will see a summary of the overall class attendance.

Next to each student’s name, you will see a column with their overall percentage of attendance, followed by columns for each class meeting.  To make adjustments to a class meeting, click on the date header at the top of the column.  From here, you can do the following:

• Mark all students present or absent
• Clear all marks
• Exempt the meeting from the attendance record
• Edit the meeting – you can do this if you forgot to take attendance in class and are entering it the next day.
• Delete the meeting

If you need to add an additional class meeting to the attendance list, hover to the right or left of any date column and click on the small purple button that appears.  This will create a new class meeting that you can edit to fit your schedule.

Cause

To adhere to state guidelines for contact tracing, all USJ members will need to track who they interact with on campus.  The Blackboard attendance tool is an easy way for faculty to keep a record of all students who attend class in person.