Canvas: How to Set Up Attendance

Attendance (by aPlus+ Attendance) is a comprehensive attendance-taking solution and is deeply integrated into Canvas for you and your students. It is extremely flexible to accommodate a wide variety of attendance taking needs and course schedules. It has been preloaded with your courses' schedule timetables, which you can adjust at any time to account for changes in your course needs.

This article will guide you through the process of setting up Attendance in your Canvas course.

First-Time Attendance Setup

The first time you click on Attendance in the left navigation in your Canvas course, you will see:

You will then be brought to the Attendance Setup screen. The screen capture below shows the default settings. If you have not made any changes to the class schedule fed from Banner and if you are not grading attendance, simply accept the default settings by clicking on Apply.

Making Changes After Initial Attendance Setup

If you have closed this screen and want to revisit Attendance Setup, simply click on Attendance in the left navigation and click on Attendance Setup.

Attendance Settings

If you want to learn more about this attendance tracking tool, read on. Details about each setting are described below.

Import Canvas course calendar events

Select this option to have calendar events for this Canvas course imported as attendance sessions.

• This setting can be used to track attendance at events such as review sessions or activities other than the Banner scheduled course sessions.
• If you have Zoom Pro class sessions scheduled through Canvas and they match Banner class times, you do not need to check this setting.

Editing Canvas course calendar events

• You may want to import some but not all Canvas calendar events into Attendance. To edit, click on Attendance in the left navigation, select Sessions at the top, click on the drop down for the session you do not want to include, and select Delete session. This will delete the session from Attendance, NOT from the Canvas calendar.

If you want to import only specific calendar events, see import label filter below.

Import attendance sessions from student information system

• This setting is selected as the default so that Attendance automatically imports class sessions from Banner. If you have made changes to your course schedule that are not accurately reflected in Banner, you can uncheck and manually enter your sessions.

Imported session weighting

• This setting allows you to edit how the session duration will be converted into session ‘points’. In most cases you will leave this setting at the default. Click on the question mark icon for details.

Specify import label filter

• This setting allows you to filter the events you want to import from the Canvas calendar.
• If you are not importing any Canvas Calendar events, simply leave at the default (unselected).
• If you want to import all events, you do not need to use a filter.
• To select specific Canvas calendar events, click on Specify import label filter, choose the drop down Only include events with matching lables, and select your list of labels (i.e. Lab, review).

Merge multiple section calendars into one

• Select this option if for courses with multiple sections if you want to have a single section calendar for recording attendance.

Record attendance as assignment grades

• Select this option to have each student's attendance submitted as grades to a Canvas assignment. If you deselect this option after the assignment has been created, the assignment is not deleted (you can delete it from the assignments area). More details on graded attendance in our Knowledge Base article Canvas: How to Take Attendance

Select additional instructor users

• Select this option to choose additional users (Tas, co-instructors) who will have access to manage attendance for this course.
• Note that only the course instructor can take attendance for Zoom sessions as these are tied to individual accounts rather than to the course.

How to Take Attendance with Attendance in Canvas

Now that you have the Attendance tool set up, it is time to take attendance. For details, see our Knowledge Base article Canvas: aPlus+ Attendance Grading