Online participation to mark attendance?

Currently participation and attendance are two different things.  Seeing participation is useful for many things, but I personally need to see an attendance percentage and many of our professors aren't actually marking attendance because they think that's what the participation is for (we continue to work on explaining that).  Can we allow participation to trigger marking attendance automatically (i.e. a student who participates on 9/19 is automatically marked present for that week of class) so there isn't that second step of having to view everyone's participation just to mark attendance?