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Online Attendance from Student Activity in Lessons

Cameron Harvey

June 06, 2019 14:04

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Currently, Populi will mark a student in an online class as 'attended' or 'participated' "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."

We would like a better way to quickly track all online students based on their last date of attendance which pulls from student activity. I would like there to be a way where students engaged in a lesson, watching the media, counts towards active participation in the class and marks the student present.

Ideally, there would be a setting that could customize what counts towards class participation, perhaps even an amount of time watching media in a lesson. It is nice that we can go in and have instructors manually updated active participation by reviewing the time tracking section on the Course->Reporting tab, but would be very helpful from an early alert (student intervention / flagging) perspective that these active participation was automatic.

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5 comments

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  Adam Sentz July 02, 2019 18:32 Official comment

  If you want Lesson progress to count towards participation there's a setting in Academics > Settings now called Count lesson activity as participation.

  Edited by Adam Sentz July 02, 2019 18:33
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  Blake Walter June 06, 2019 14:09

  I also second the request for including a setting that allows people to customize which activities get logged as participation.

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  Adam Sentz June 06, 2019 17:19

  We are reviewing the Title IV documentation again to see if there's anything else we can include. 

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  Cameron Harvey June 06, 2019 18:02

  Thanks Adam for reviewing. Look forward to update.  I also appreciate you guys caring enough to consider the federal guidelines around this to make sure we are all in compliance.

  Pg 5-60 in the 2018 federal student aid handbook https://ifap.ed.gov/fsahandbook/attachments/1718FSAHbkActiveIndex.pdf

  Academically related activities include but are not limited to the following: ◆ physically attending a class where there is an opportunity for direct interaction between the instructor and students; ◆ submitting an academic assignment; ◆ taking an exam, completing an interactive tutorial, or participating in computer-assisted instruction; ◆ attending a study group that is assigned by the school; ◆ participating in an online discussion about academic matters; and ◆ initiating contact with a faculty member to ask a question about the academic subject studied in the course.

  I would consider watching media as "interactive tutorial" or possibly "participating in computer-assisted instruction."

  It would seem silly to have to have a "test" that followed every video or lesson that asked the student "did you read/watch the content from this lesson".  I could see that as a work around, but would be a bit of a curriculum design burden for online instructors to always create micro-quizzes to physically click an answer and submit, when they already physically click on the video or lesson material - especially when Populi is able to monitor how long they engage with the lesson page. 

   

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  Evan Donovan January 13, 2022 20:02

  I don't think watching media counts as interactive tutorial by USDE regs, since it's not actually interactive. It's just something that you passively watch. You would have to have something that you were clicking on as part of it.
  
  This is why the LDA in Populi, as we've used it for Title IV purposes, hasn't included the last date that people simply read a page or viewed a video in the course.
  
  I think the analogy I would use here is that attendance in a course, for USDE purposes, doesn't count reading the textbook. Viewing an online video that is not interactive is like reading a textbook.