Yes. At a minimum, you must take attendance for the first week. It is helpful to Financial Aid and Student Records if you record attendance periodically throughout the term.

How to record attendance using the BMCC Canvas Attendance Tool

Why do instructors need to record attendance?

When a student enrolls in a class they are in a Scheduled status in Anthology Student (formerly CNS). To receive financial aid or a grade in the class, students must be moved to a Current status. The only way for students to move to this status is for an instructor to mark a ‘present’ attendance record for each student in Anthology Student. For other federal and state compliance reasons, instructors must mark all students ‘present’ or ‘absent’ for at least one day before the end of the first week of class. The deadline for submitting attendance each term is the “Last Day to Post 1st Week Attendance” line in the Academic Calendar.

I’m teaching an online-only class which has no meeting times. Do I need to record attendance?

Yes! All instructors must record attendance for all students in all courses before the deadline each term. How to determine attendance in online courses is up to each individual instructor. The recommended way is to require an assignment (regular assignment, quiz, discussion post, etc.) in Canvas during the first week of the term and consider an assignment submission by a student to be a ‘present’ attendance record. When using the BMCC Canvas Attendance Tool (details below), activity in your online courses will automatically be marked as present.

How do I record attendance for students?

Video Guide (video part 2, includes rosters and attendance)

Since attendance records are stored in Anthology Student, it is possible to mark attendance in the faculty portal. However, especially for online courses, using the portal for attendance can be cumbersome.

The recommended way to record attendance for all classes is to use the BMCC Canvas Attendance Tool. This tool was built by BMCC computer science faculty and is not part of the normal Canvas installation – right now it only exists at BMCC. If you have any questions about how to use the tool, please do not contact Instructure or post on Canvas forums as they won’t know anything about it. See the If you need help section at the bottom of this page if you have questions or encounter any errors using the tool.

The rest of this page includes detailed instructions for how to use the BMCC Canvas Attendance Tool.

1. Load the tool for your course. Each course contains a green “Attendance” button just to the left of the course name. Click this button in your course to open the tool:
   
2. While the tool is loading it will also automatically refresh all Canvas course activity and page views (more on this later). You should see a short message after each step completes, before the tool fully loads:
   
3. Once the tool loads, you’ll see a full list of your course roster (for all sections) and attendance for the current week. Note that you can change the week view using the “Week” dropdown on the top left:
   
   At this point you can record “present” or  “absent” records for each student by clicking the cell for their name and corresponding day. Multiple clicks will cycle through present/absent/none. You can also use the shortcut buttons at the top to record present/absent/none for all students on a given day. Note: all changes are saved automatically as you mark days.
   
   You will also likely see page views and “activity” icons scattered throughout the days. Page views are indicated by an “eye” icon and activities (e.g. assignment submissions, discussion posts, etc.) are in a clickable box with an assignment icon. Click an assignment icon to show details about the items completed by the student that day.
   

   For online-only courses with no standing meeting times, course activity will automatically be marked present (note: only activity will be marked present, not page views):
   

   If your course has regular meeting times, course activity in Canvas will not automatically be marked present. However, you can still use this feature manually by clicking the “Mark Activity Present” button at the top of the tool. The tool will ask for confirmation before marking all activities as ‘present’.
   
   

   This final step is the most important! While recording attendance in step 4, the data is saved within Canvas only. The BMCC tools have an integration with Anthology Student but that step must be initiated separately. To “push” your recorded attendance to Anthology Student (was CNS), click the “Send to CNS” button

   

   The confirmation box will indicate how many records will be sent (records already sent will not be resent)

   

   If you click “Go!” the records will be sent in a batch. At this point It will take up to 3 minutes for the Anthology Student integration tool to receive and confirm the data. The records you just sent will be “dimmed” in the interface and a 3 minute timer will begin at the top, next to the “Send to CNS” button

   

   

   After 3 minutes, the tool will automatically retrieve the attendance data from CNS to confirm it was received. Records that are verified will be marked with a light/dark diagonal pattern:

   

   Don’t worry if you accidentally close the page before the timer runs out! The data has still been sent and will be automatically retrieved for verification the next time you load the page.

4. You can also verify attendance by viewing your course rosters.
   Any students highlighted in red either have no attendance record or only absent records. If the attendance information on the roster does not match the attendance information on the Canvas Attendance page, then there must be a change in the student’s degree intent. Attendance should be resubmitted for these students.

Do not confuse the BMCC Canvas Attendance Tool with “Attendance Roll Call”

Canvas does include another Attendance tool called “Attendance Roll Call”, available as a Navigation item — that tool will NOT work for sending attendance to CNS. That tool was not built by BMCC and has no connection to Anthology Student (CNS). There’s nothing wrong with using that tool for your own use, but none of that data can be sent to CNS and you would need to ALSO either enter attendance directly in the faculty portal, or use the BMCC Attendance Tool as described above.

Important Notes

• The tool is meant to be used often! You can “Send to CNS” as often as you like – only unsent records will be sent.
• While it’s required for instructors to record attendance for the first week of class, it is recommended that you continue marking attendance throughout the term. This will ensure that you are tracking each student’s “last day of attendance”. Using course activity and marking active records as present is a simple way to update attendance in just a few seconds.
• Only records with the light/dark diagonal pattern have been verified in CNS. If you see just red or green records it means you’ve recorded the attendance in Canvas but haven’t sent to CNS. Click the “Send to CNS” button!
• Once a record as been marked and sent for a student on a given day, it cannot be removed. You can change it from present to absent, but not “none”. For example, if you change an already verified “absent” record to “present”, the verified stripes will go away, the record will turn green and must be “sent to CNS” again.
• If, for some reason, a record fails when sending to CNS it should appear in flashing yellow in the Attendance tool. If you see flashing yellow squares after sending to CNS, please see the If you need help section below.

If you need help

If you have questions about how to use the tool or encounter any errors while loading or using the tool, please email Greg Schulberg (gschulberg@bluecc.edu) and copy Gary Parker (gparker@bluecc.edu). Please include the name of the course you were working on when you had the question or error, a URL to the course in Canvas (copy/paste the URL from the address bar on the course home page), details about the issue and screen shots if possible.