Today online classes are the primary mode of teaching and learning. A regular day for a student starts with logging into the teaching app, taking classes and logging out at the end of the day. But the question is how teachers will know how many students attended the online classes and how many did not.
As you see attendance is and has always been important for teachers & schools to determine the academics of students. In offline classes, the attendance procedure is easy as teachers roll call the students and mark their attendance. However, when it comes to taking attendance in online classes, this method might not work that well because students are not in front of their eyes. That is why methods like creating reports and using attendance management software are being used nowadays.
In this article, you will get to know various online ways using which teachers can take attendance in online classes.
Manual Attendance: This is the traditional way of taking attendance, manual attendance. This is going to be exactly like taking offline manual attendance, just teachers will take it online. In manual online attendance, teachers can roll call all the students and ask the students to turn on their mics to confirm their attendance. This method can work, but can be quite time-consuming for online classes and can also be unreliable. Sometimes, network issues can result in a delay in speaking.
Google Attendance Forms: Taking attendance using Google Forms can be the second method that teachers can use in online classes. In this process, teachers just have to create a Google Attendance form and forward it to the students during the online class session. Then students can mark their attendance themselves, in this Google Attendance Form students have to fill out basic and necessary details like their name, roll number, email id, and date. After filling in these details they will submit it and teachers can check the answers submitted by them, this method helps in solving the problem of proxy attendance to some extent.
Online Attendance Polls: Keeping students engaged during the whole lecture is quite difficult, and when students are learning online, where teachers are not in front of them to monitor, it can create problems. However, teachers can solve this problem by taking online attendance polls, in which they will ask some series of rapid questions from students and ask them to do polls for answers. This way teachers will get to know which students are active during the lecture, and only their attendance will be marked. This will solve the problem where students are present online, but are not present on-screen.
Video Attendance: Taking video attendance is another method that teachers can use to take online attendance. As its name suggests in video attendance teachers can roll call the students and ask them to turn on their cameras for that instance and then the teacher can mark the attendance of students. This method can work best for classes with small student numbers because with a larger number of students it will not be possible for teachers to go through roll calls and ask them to turn on their cameras for attendance.
Use Login Details: As you know students need to log into the online teaching app to attend classes, these apps keep a record of login details. Teachers can use this data to determine how many students attended the online class. However, this data will only show the log-in details and not the detailed information like student interaction throughout the lecture, log-out details etc. This can be misleading, as students can log out mid-lecture after marking their attendance and the teacher wouldn’t know.
Attendance Management System: Attendance Management System, is software which can be used separately or as a part of school ERP. The task of an attendance management system is to keep track of students’ attendance automatically. It records details of every login and log-out activity of students throughout the course session, and the best thing is it’s all done automatically. It means teachers don’t have to do anything other than teach, this system will create students’ accounts and keep their attendance records automatically.