Introduction

Every institution weighs attendance tools differently, and no platform gets everything right. If your institution teaches with Brightspace, or is thinking about using it to record attendance across the university, this post is for you. This post functions as an opinionated overview rather than going into the technical details. It is recommended to read the official resources for a deeper understanding of how it works and how to set it up. 

If you want to switch from the traditional paper sign-in method, Brightspace’s built-in Attendance tool is a sensible place to start, since it’s already part of the platform your teachers use every day. But it has gaps that become noticeable in large lectures and when attendance needs to feed into grades or central reporting. We’ll look at how the tool works, what it does well, where it falls short, and how to work around those limits. This post is part of a series that also covers attendance tracking in Moodle, Canvas, and Blackboard.

How attendance works in Brightspace

As with every platform in this series, we look at Brightspace through four criteria, taken from our guide to choosing attendance tracking software. A good attendance system should be:

• Fast and easy to use: taking attendance should fit into the start of a class without slowing it down.
• Accurate: what’s recorded should match who was actually in the room.
• Flexible: it should handle a small tutorial as well as a large lecture, in person or online.
• Reliable in its reporting: the data should be useful to advisors, programme leads and compliance teams, not just the teacher.

First, Brightspace by D2L already includes the Attendance tool as standard, so there’s nothing extra to install. This is already a big plus for making adoption as easy as possible. Whether teachers can use it right away, however, depends on how your institution has set it up: access is controlled through role permissions that only your organisation’s administrator can assign, and the tool may also need to be added to the course navigation bar, the specific instructions are out of the scope of this post, so I would suggest reading the official page for more detailed information. 

Setting up registers, sessions and schemes

Brightspace organises attendance in three layers. A register is the container, for example “Weekly seminar” or “Lab group B”. You can create several registers per course and limit each one to specific groups or sections, which is handy for courses that combine lectures with smaller tutorials. Inside each register are the sessions, the individual classes you take attendance for. You can create them all at the start of the semester or add more later on. Each session is identified by a name, and D2L’s own example uses simple labels like “Week 1” and “Week 2”, rather than a date.

The third layer is the attendance scheme, which defines the statuses you can choose from. The default scheme is very basic: only Present (100%) and Absent (0%). But well, the good news is that you can create your own custom schemes with statuses such as Late or Excused, each with its own symbol and percentage. Statuses without a percentage are simply left out of the attendance calculation, so an excused absence doesn’t count against a student unless you want it to. But it is really important to keep in mind that once you’ve entered attendance data, you can’t switch a register to a different scheme.

Taking attendance

The actual attendance-taking method is rather limited in Brightspace the only option is for the teacher to manually mark each student. You open the session, pick a status for each student from a drop-down menu, and save. A small time saver is to mark the whole class as present first and then adjust the exceptions. For a seminar, this takes a minute or two. With a few hundred students, however, it’s no longer practical. Students have no way of registering themselves: as Toronto Metropolitan University puts it, “there is currently no way for students to indicate their own attendance in a session”. We’ll come back to what this means for large classes in the next section.

Reports and grades

For each student, Brightspace calculates an attendance percentage across all sessions in a register. A useful feature here is the Cause for Concern threshold: if a student’s attendance drops below a minimum you set, for example 80%, a warning icon appears next to their name, so struggling students stand out straight away. Students can also see their own record if you make the register visible to them. All data can be exported as a CSV file, including totals per status and the overall attendance percentage. One thing to keep in mind: attendance and grades are kept separate in Brightspace, which we’ll look at more closely in the next section.

Where Brightspace’s attendance falls short

Brightspace’s Attendance tool has some well-designed features. Registers can be limited to individual groups or sections, custom schemes give teachers control over how each status counts, and the Cause for Concern threshold flags students with low attendance without anyone having to look for them. As an organisational tool, it definitely does its job. The weaknesses show up in two places: how attendance gets recorded in the first place, and what happens to the data afterwards.

Accuracy and speed

The teacher enters every record in Brightspace’s Attendance tool, because students have no way of checking themselves in. That’s fine in a small classroom. In a lecture of 150, however, picking a status from a drop-down for each student simply isn’t realistic. There are some workarounds. Toronto Metropolitan University, for example, suggests using either a paper sign-in sheet or an external tool such as a Google Form. Both bring their own problems. With a paper sheet, friends can easily sign in for each other. It also takes longer than a self check-in. And afterwards, someone has to type all the names into an online database. A Google Form link is even easier to pass on. Once it’s in the course group chat, students can fill it in from anywhere. Neither workaround really solves the problem.

Reliability in its reporting

Another crucial gap that was found is between attendance and grades. Brightspace calculates an attendance percentage for every student, but according to the Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), “there is no way to directly tie an attendance register to your gradebook”. This means if attendance counts toward the final grade, the data has to be moved by hand. Stony Brook University gives further insights. The workaround they use to solve this problem is to create a separate grade item for every class date. But unfortunately, either way, the same information ends up being recorded twice, and every manual step is a chance for mistakes.

The same applies beyond the course. Attendance data is needed for visa monitoring, funding and accreditation, but the export teachers work with is a CSV file per register. Bringing that together across courses, programmes or a whole faculty means more spreadsheets and more manual work that could have been used to actually work with the relevant data. That’s where a dedicated tool can help.

4 A better way: Attendance Radar 

To solve these problems, we made an integration of Attendance Radar (AR) directly into Brightspace to build on an already working system and provide a workaround for its deficiencies. With Attendance Radar, instead of a teacher picking a status for 150 students one by one, students check themselves in on their phones. The lecturer’s phone sends out a Bluetooth signal, and students can only register while they’re within range. That replaces both of the workarounds above. Unlike a Google Form link, the signal can’t be forwarded to the group chat, and unlike a paper sheet, a friend can’t sign in for someone who isn’t there: each device can only check in once per session. There’s also no manual work after class, since the record is digital from the start and, through our API, the tool can automatically send attendance records directly into your own systems, so advisors, programme leads and international offices work with central data rather than a CSV file per register. An administrator panel and single sign-on with university accounts make it practical to roll out across faculties.

An additional benefit of an AR integration is an improved version of Brightspace’s Cause for Concern flag. AR shows each student’s average attendance and lets lecturers compare attendance across their courses, so a student who is slipping in several classes at once is easier to spot. For the institution,

Interested? Get in touch with us to find out how the Brightspace integration would work at your institution.