Attendance and Grades

I have found the following steps to be a good way to use the Attendance tool and the Grades tool. Unfortunately data from the Attendance tool cannot be pushed directly to the Grades tool. Here are the steps I take in my face-to-face history class:

1. Create a grade item that covers multiple class meetings (in my case I do two, one for each half of the semester).
   
2. Create attendance registers that match the grade items (each register will have one session per class meeting).
   
3. After the last date for each attendance grade item, export the data from the attendance register (click on the name of the register to view the data and then click the Export All Data button). This creates a .csv file that can be opened in MS Excel, where the "% Attendance" field can be used to determine the grade for that register.
   
4. Follow the export and import steps detailed in the Importing Grades post in this blog (it might be helpful to export only the attendance grade item to make copying and pasting data from one Excel file to another easier). Be sure to follow exactly the directions regarding file format.
5. The import process takes a few steps, and the third step previews the data before you import it to your grades tool.
   

What is the Last Date of Attendance?

D2L's user progress can be used to document a student's last date of attendance (the last date they accessed your course offering). This is linked () from each student on the classlist. The User Progress page includes a pull-down menu to look at detailed statistics in several areas (content, discussions, quizzes, etc.) but all of the pages include a Login Summary table that displays the last date and time the student accessed the course offering.

Character limit for various text fields

The various identifying fields inside Desire2Learn have limits on the number of characters (including spaces) allowed:

Tool	Item	Field	Limit
News	Item	Headline	400
Content	Module and Topic	Title	150
Discussions	Forum and Topic	Title	250
Discussions	Message	Subject	150
Dropbox	Folder	Name	128
Quizzes	Quiz [Properties and Submission Views and Reports]	Name	256
Quizzes	Quiz [Restrictions]	Password	20
Quizzes	Question Library  [Sections and Random Sections]	Name	256
Quizzes	Question Library [Questions and Information]	Title	256
Quizzes	Question Library [Question Images]	Description	1791
Grades	Grade Item and Category	Name	127
Email	Compose New Message	Subject	256
Attendance	Register and Session	Name	128
Attendance	Session	Description	128
Calendar	Event	Title	128
Chat	Chat	Title	150
Chat	Chat	Message	400
Checklist	Checklist and Item	Name	128
Groups	Category and Group	Name	128
Groups	Group	Code	50

Attendance

There is an Attendance tool that you can use to track attendance information and share with your students.

Grading attendance

I found an interesting article on a method to grade attendance in Desire2Learn posted by a colleague at St. Cloud Technical College in Minnesota:

https://sctc.ims.mnscu.edu/shared/FacultyTutorials/GradingAttendanceInD2L.pdf

Note that this method does not use the Attendance tool in Desire2Learn.