Keeping track of online attendance and participation

You can use online course delivery methods to improve attendance/participation taking and reporting (for IPEDS, SAP, and your own internal reporting). Here's how it works...

Set up online/distance delivery methods

You can use Populi's built-in Online delivery method, which is set up to handle online attendance tracking and reporting right out of the box, as it were. Or you can set up your own delivery methods...

1. Go to Academics > Settings > Course Delivery Methods.
2. Click Add a delivery method.
3. Give the method a name.
4. Check next to Online/Distance Education.
5. Click Save.

Now that you've done this, you'll be able to set any of your courses to this delivery method.

Set the course delivery method

To activate the online attendance features for a course, you need only choose an Online/Distance delivery method. You can set a default in the course catalog or you can set it for individual courses.

• Course catalog: Go to the catalog course page and set the delivery method to one of your Online/Distance Education methods. This setting will be applied to all future instances of this course.
• Individual courses: Go to a course you've added to an academic term. On the Course > Info view, set the delivery method to one of the Online/Distance Education methods.
  • You can do this before the course begins or afterwards—even after students have submitted work. When you set the delivery method, Populi will backfill participation data based on existing records of student activity. See below for more details.

Recording participation

Courses set up as described above will automatically record student participation.

• When a student submits an assignment, starts or posts in a discussion, or takes a test, Populi will create a participation record for that student on that date. (You can also record Lesson activity as participation by enabling the Count lesson activity as participation setting in Academics > Settings.)
• When you change a course delivery method to an Online/Distance method after students have done any of the above, Populi will backfill participation records for those students and dates.
• To see participation records for students, go to the course Attendance view and click the participation bar on the date you're looking at. In the participation view, click Detail next to a student's name to see why he was recorded as having participated.

If you have mixed courses—that is, courses with on-campus and online students, you can keep track of both attendance and participation:

1. When adding the course to an academic term, make sure to add meeting times.
2. Set the course delivery method to an Online/Distance method.
3. You can then take attendance as normal for the on-campus students; Populi will automatically track participation for all the students in the course.
   • Online students will show in the meeting time attendance view. You can do as you please with these students—but you'll likely want to mark them as Excused.

You can also manually mark a student as having participated...

1. Go to the course Attendance view.
2. Toggle to show Online attendance.
3. Click the bar on the date on which you'd like to record participation (the ones that say __ students participated) or double-click the appropriate date on the calendar.
4. In the participation view, check next to the student(s) for whom you wish to record participation.
5. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click Save Participation.