Tech Tuesday Teaching TIP

Do you assign points for attendance in your courses? In my class, every student begins the semester with a certain number of points, and those points decline - by larger and larger amounts - the more absences a student accumulates.

The question is this: how do you get Canvas to capture these scaled points? The Roll Call Attendance tool in Canvas has many helpful features, but this sliding scale of points is not one of them (if you want to see more about Roll Call, see "How Do I Use the Roll Call Attendance Tool in a Course?" in Instructure's Canvas Guides).

My DIY solution is to create my own Attendance assignment within Canvas that reflects the attendance policy as published in the course syllabus. On the right, you see the attendance policy as stated in the syllabus; below, you see the assignment in Canvas. All I needed to do was copy my policy from the syllabus document, and paste it into the Canvas Assignment: