Qwickly Attendance Classic: Fixing an Off-sync Grade Center Column

Why does a grade center column go off-sync?

An off sync grade center column generally happens when Attendance's API requests to the LMS to update the grades fail. This can happen due to a few different reasons.

How is this fixed?

Step One: The user can navigate to the "Attendance Record" page. Here, they can find a "Sync Grades" button in the top right corner under the course name. Clicking this button should push the latest grades back to the grade center.

Step Two: If this doesn't work,  a user can go into a course's settings and "recreate" the grade book columns by turning off the grade center settings in the course.

- Open Attendance in the course and then go into settings. In here, you should turn off the "Grade center Integration" settings. (Screenshot attached below)

- Once you've set these values, you will have to save the settings at the bottom of the page. This will remove the current off sync grade center settings.

- Then, you can turn the Grade Center Integration settings back on again to how you would have had it before (Total Points or Per Session). Then you would scroll to the bottom of the page and save settings again. This should make an API call to create a new column for Attendance that should receive the latest grades.

More Information on this issue

Qwickly Attendance LTI uses the LMS's REST APIs to push back grades to the gradebook. This is done by creating a gradebook column with the API calls and saving the ID of the newly created column, so that column can be targeted in the future with update calls to update the grades.

• Sometimes, this connection with a gradebook column is corrupted when a user alters the grade center column manually or deletes it. Deleting a column created by Qwickly Attendance manually is NOT recommended because the application would continue to try to post data to a column that doesn't exist anymore
• Another reason a grade center column may not update is that the API token with which we would be making the API calls becomes invalid. API tokens generally last for 1 hour, so a user session that lasts longer than an hour may not be able to update the grade center column

Alternatively, if the issue seems to be recurring for certain users, it may be worth looking into turning off the grade center integration until the class is finished taking Attendance at the end of the term. This way, when the grade center integration is turned on, the grades that have been published will be the final grades and won't need changing. In the meantime, students can still see their Attendance records by opening the tool throughout the class term.