You can obviously record student attendance in class using a paper chart or an Excel spreadsheet. However, Moodle’s Attendance Activity offers not only comparable features, but also several advantages over those possibilities:
- With Moodle’s Attendance activity, you can set up all the possible class meeting days for the semester at the same time.
- Moodle sets point values for Present, Excused Late, and Absent (by default 2, 1, 1, and 0 points, respectively), whose values you can change. Moodle then keeps track of the students' running attendance scores (points received compared to maximum current total), displaying that running score in the Gradebook.
- You can mark all students as present (for a particular class session) with a single click, and you can then modify the setting for any student who was not present that day.
- Moodle allows you to see the attendance record for a particular student for a particular time period (monthly or weekly).
- Moodle allows the student to see his/her attendance history as you have recorded it.
Taking attendance in Moodle involves three separate steps: creating the Attendance activity, adding sessions for which to record attendance, and then recording attendance for each class session. We describe those three processes in the following detailed instructions.