Qwickly Attendance: Student Activity Mode

Note: This feature is only available with a license of Qwickly Attendance Plus and Qwickly Attendance Pro

Qwickly Attendance's Student Activity mode allows Instructors to mark students' attendance based on submissions made to a variety of possible assessments within the LMS.  Qwickly Attendance does different lookups based on what LMS is being used. This document describes how Student Activity Mode runs for each LMS.

For each LMS, the user would first begin by selecting a "Start Date" and "End Date" in Student Activity Mode.

In Blackboard

• For "No Course Login", Qwickly Attendance would check the "Last Accessed" date stored by Blackboard for each user, and whether that date falls within the start and end date. If a user does not have a "Last Accessed" date within the date range, they are assigned an Absent (Blackboard defines a student's "Last Accessed" date within a course as "the last date the user accessed the associated course or content contained by that course.")
• For other activities (Discussion, Assignment, Test, Journal, Blog), Qwickly Attendance would first check which assignments have created a column in the course's grade center. Qwickly Attendance would then show users a list of activities which have a related grade center column
• Finally, when an activity is selected by the instructor for lookup, Qwickly Attendance does a check on the selected activity's user submissions and check's if each user's submissions occurred between the start date and end date. If it falls within range, a Present status is assigned to the user.

In Canvas

• For "No Course Login", Qwickly Attendance would check the "Last Activity At" date stored by Canvas for each user, and whether that date falls within the start and end date. If a user does not have a "Last Activity At" date within the date range, they are assigned an Absent (Canvas defines a student's "Last Activity At" date within a course as "The last attended date of the user for the enrollment in a course.")
• For Discussions, Qwickly Attendance does an API lookup to see whether the course has any discussions which were "posted", "delayed posted" or "due" between the Start and End dates. 
• For Assignments, Qwickly Attendance does an API lookup to see whether the course has any assignments which were "created" or "due" between the Start and End dates. 
• For Quizzes, Qwickly Attendance does an API lookup to see whether the course has any quizzes available
• Finally, when an activity is selected by the instructor for lookup, Qwickly Attendance does a check on the selected activity's user submissions and check's if each user's submissions occurred between the start date and end date. If it falls within range, a Present status is assigned to the user.

In Desire2Learn

• For "No Course Login", Qwickly Attendance would check the "Last Accessed" date stored by D2L for each user, and whether that date falls within the start and end date. If a user does not have a "Last Accessed" date within the date range, they are assigned an Absent (D2L defines a student's "Last Accessed" date within a course as "the date the user last accessed the org unit.")
• For Discussions, Qwickly Attendance does an API lookup to see whether the course has any discussions forums and topics available 
• For Assignments, Qwickly Attendance does an API lookup to see whether the course has any assignments which have a start/end/due date within the start and end date selected in Qwickly Attendance
• For Quizzes, Qwickly Attendance does an API lookup to see whether the course has any quizzes which have a start/end/due date within the start and end date selected in Qwickly Attendance
• Finally, when an activity is selected by the instructor for lookup, Qwickly Attendance does a check on the selected activity's user submissions and check's if each user's submissions occurred between the start date and end date. If it falls within range, a Present status is assigned to the user.

Regarding the "List all available activities for a course" setting

This setting is only available for Canvas and Desire2Learn users

The goal with the option "List all available activities for a course" is to allow the instructors the ability to choose from as many (or as little) assignments as they would like in Student Activity Mode.

The challenge for Qwickly Attendance lies in how to display "available" activities for any given activity type. Some courses may have activities without any due dates, some may have activities with multiple due dates, some courses set up all their activities within the first week but have due dates all at the end of the semester, etc. Thus, there may be situations where an activity is set up in a way which is incompatible with Qwickly Attendance's date detections.

In order to accommodate all of these scenarios, Qwickly Attendance can display the available activities in alphabetic order, allowing the instructor to choose as many activities as they would like to look up.

Updates to Student Activity Mode

The new Student Activity workflow presents more options for the user, including the ability to look up activities of a certain type and to look up attempts for users based on specific Activities.

The second screenshot illustrates some of the changes. In the second example, a user who selects "Have a Discussion Submission" for the date range "2020/02/01" to "2020/02/20" would see a list of discussion topics that Qwickly Attendance was able to find from the grade center. The user would then be able to click on the specific activity which would trigger look-ups of attempts for that activity. If the tool detects an attempt for one of the selected activities, the tool will now also add the specific activity name to the comment. 

This should ideally allow our users to be more specific with their look-ups and detect which activities cannot be looked up if we do not get any responses back from them.

Note: The "New Quizzes" in Canvas are appearing under "Assignment Attempts" because they are labeled in the Canvas system as Assignments.  We are looking to see if we can include them under Quiz Attempt, but in the meantime, you will find the "New Quizzes" under Assignment Attempts.

Student Activity Old Workflow

Previously, when an activity was selected, Qwickly Attendance would be attempting to look up all attempts found for any of the selected types of activities. For example, the screenshot above shows that a user selected "Have a Discussion Submission" for the date range "2020/02/01" to "2020/02/07". This would trigger Qwickly Attendance to retrieve grade center items that are of type "Graded Discussion" and lookup Attempts that fall within the selected date range. 

This workflow presented certain issues while beta testing. The major concern stemmed from the fact that activities that had been made unavailable in the course were causing API lookup issues. The API call to look up attempts for such activities was timing out without giving any responses back to our tool. So, it was causing the tool to stall at random times without any indication of what may have happened.