This article is part of a series explaining the enhancements that will be introduced as part of the Blackboard upgrade scheduled for 18-20 January 2019.

The Attendance tool allows instructors to manually create a record of student attendance in each Blackboard site. Blackboard will automatically create an attendance session labelled today, but instructors can create additional sessions or ‘meetings’, for which you can then mark each student (or all students) as present, late, absent or excused. Meeting names are limited to dates only (or Today or Yesterday) and if the same students are attending more than one session on a single date it may be difficult to distinguish between their attendance at different sessions.

Attendance is linked to Grade Centre and ‘attendance grades’ are calculated based on their status:

• Present – set at a fixed value of 100%
• Late – default is set at 50%, but this can be adjusted if required
• Absent – set at a fixed value of 0%
• Excused – counts as present for scoring purposes. It won’t negatively impact a student’s overall attendance grade

You can view summaries of individual students’ overall attendance records, as well as overall summary statistics about the cohort that shows average attendance and the number (and percentage) of students with perfect attendance, average or above average attendance, and below average attendance.

Students can see their own record of attendance in My Grades.

This video from Blackboard provides a useful overview of the Attendance tool.