Instructors who wish to use attendance as a class participation metric are recommended to use the Online Attendance feature in Canvas' New Analytics which shows which day-by-day students accesses to a course.

Alternatively, instructors may add the Attendance (Roll Call) external tool application into their class to score attendance (or to simply chart it for information purposes.) This application was designed for use in K-12 classes and has features that are irrelevant to higher ed  including an assigned seating chart, badging, and penalties for lateness. Instructors should ignore these features and they should also be aware that this tool has been provided to us by Canvas as-is and there are no plans for any further development on it.

Online Attendance Metrics

The New Analytics feature in Canvas includes an Online Attendance feature to show which days students have accessed your course. This feature allows you to filter by course section, student, week, and set whether specific criteria have been met.

Complete documentation for using the tool is available in the Canvas knowledge portal.

Setup Attendance (Roll Call)

To use the Attendance (Roll Call) tool in your course, it needs to be added from the external tool selector. Add it in the desired module by clicking the +plus-sign in the module header:

Then select 'External tool' from the dropdown menu, then click Attendance (Roll Call) to add the application to your course:

The first time you take attendance using the tool, Canvas automatically creates an assignment for Roll Call Attendance and adds a column to the Gradebook. As shown below, you can use the Assignment to weight a grade item for attendance (or zero its weight if you are using the tool as a subjective measure.)

Important Note: be sure to set up grading and weighting values before taking attendance, as changes to grade values can cause issues with the final display values and these cannot be changed.

Using Attendance (Roll Call)

1. Click on the Attendance (Roll Call) link to open it:

2. On the displayed Attendance page, the gear icon near the top right opens a dropdown to allow you to change the settings or generate an attendance report:

3. In Settings, you may check the box to block attendance from being included in the course final grade. You may also wish to use the slider to set the percentage of attendance tardiness that counts as:

4. Use the date navigation icons to choose the date for marking attendance:

5. You should only need the List tab to see the list of your students. The Class tab is for creating seating plans so can likely be ignored.

6. You can filter the attendance list by course section (e.g., LEC A1, SEM A2):

7. Mark students present, absent, or unmarked by clicking the icons to the left of their names: 

8. As designed for K-12 classes, you may also click the 'More' icon to the right of a student's name to mark them as late:

Grading Attendance (optional)

Note: If grading attendance, it is especially important to set up the value and weights for attendance scoring before taking attendance or altering grade values as the application will create issues with the display of scores.

To configure the attendance points and weightings, you must first enter the tool and score the attendance for 1 student and then remove that value.

Once the tool has been used, an assignment called  Roll Call Attendance is created with the default grade set to 100. You can change the score by accessing your course Assignments link, selecting Edit under the 3 dots to the right of the item, and then entering a new point score:

You can also move the Roll Call Attendance to a new assignment group and/or include it in the set a grade weighting for it in the Assignment group:

Canvas support portal contains complete documentation for using the Roll Call Attendance tool.