There’s a new tool in Blackboard for tracking attendance, Qwickly Attendance. You may have noticed the link under course tools in the course Control Panel (see image on right).

Qwickly Attendance provides two ways to capture attendance data. First, you can manually enter whether a student was present or not in your class.

Alternatively, you can provide a passcode in class for students to login and record their own attendance. You open attendance at the start of class, set a time limit to when students must check-in, and students validate their presence by clicking on an attendance link you place on the course menu, entering the code you provide, and clicking the “check-in” button.

How to use Qwickly Attendance:
Getting Started with Qwickly Attendance
Manual Attendance Entry by Instructor
Student Check-in Set-up
Student Check-in

Blackboard has reports that, depending on how often students must access Blackboard and interact with content, discussion boards or other tools, can provide course participation as a stand-in for attendance. The “Single Course User Participation” report found under “Course Reports”  in the Evaluation section of the course Control Panel provides a snapshot of student interaction with the course site for robust Blackboard sites. The report lists, the date/time stamp for the most recent assignment, test, discussion, journal, or blog submissions within a course for each student. Other reports provide insight into when and how long students are accessing Blackboard and in their own way can provide surrogate measures of course participation. How well they will reflect course participation will depend on how you are using Blackboard. More robust Blackboard usage will provide better measures of participation.

How to run Blackboard course reports

If you are using a manual method of attendance tracking, why not give one of these tools a try? The LIT team is available to walk you through set up and help with deployment.