Qwickly Attendance: Cache Student Data With Qwickly

Qwickly Attendance LTI uses your Learning Management System's REST APIs to load course and user information. When configuring Attendance LTI with your Instance, Qwickly Attendance will also have been configured as a valid and trusted developer in your instance.

In a course, Qwickly Attendance LTI then uses it's capacity as a trusted developer to make REST API calls on behalf of the user. With these REST API calls, Qwickly is able to load Course Information, Enrollment Information and User information and allow the user to run the tool for Attendance purposes.

By default, Qwickly doesn't cache any user information in it's servers. The tool requests all it's information directly from the Learning Management System and caches the data in a session cookie. While this process works for most cases, it might cause performance issues in courses with larger enrollments as wait times for REST API responses increase.

One of the steps Qwickly allows you to mitigate this is by turning on the "Cache Student Data with Qwickly" settings option in your Attendance Settings. This slightly modifies the behavior of the tool in how it retrieves user data. When the tool is opened in a course after turning on these settings, Attendance LTI will still get course and enrollment information from REST APIs. However, the tool will try to get students' information from Qwickly's database, and if it doesn't find a user's information, the tool with retrieve the information using REST API and then save it with Qwickly for future use.

There are several advantages to this:

1. Efficiency: REST API requests take longer to complete than database calls do, and thus student information will be loaded quicker if Student Data Storage is turned on.
2. Reporting: Users of Attendance Pro will be able to see student data (such as names, username, SIS ID, etc.) in their Attendance Reports if Student Data Storage is turned on.
3. Data Export: Users running a data export from the Attendance settings screen will be able to see student data in the exported csv file.

What Qwickly Stores

Qwickly may store some or all of the following data on students: First Name, Last Name, Other Name, Email, Username, Company, External ID, Student ID(SIS ID), Integration ID.

Where is the data stored?

Qwickly Attendance LTI is deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers and uses an AWS Aurora Instance in which to store data. We do not own any of the data centers, our AWS Aurora Instance is on various regions around the world based on client requests.  For more information, please refer to the official AWS release on their practices: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-center/controls/

Will the Data get updated

If Qwickly doesn't find users' first name, last name, username, or SIS ID, Qwickly will still use REST APIs and attempt to retrieve any missing values. If all values exist, Qwickly updates user information every two weeks. User Information is updated when any class that the user may be enrolled in takes Attendance.

Users can Individually Opt-Out

Qwickly also allows users to opt-out of having to store their data on an individual basis. If an institution has student data storage turned on and a student accesses their tool after their data has been saved, they will see a bar on the bottom of their page letting them know that their data is stored with Qwickly. They will be able to see what kind of data is stored, and they will have an option to opt-out. If they do opt-out, this user will be marked as opted out of data storage and their information will always be retrieved via REST APIs.