Introduction 

Canvas is one of the most widely used learning platforms in higher education, but it also has its own integrated attendance tracking system called Rolle Call. For many institutions, that makes it the obvious first choice: no extra software, no new login, and teachers can start taking attendance from their laptop or phone straight away. And while the feature works great for smaller classes, it definitely has its deficiencies. So in this post, we look at how attendance tracking in Canvas works, where it does well, where it falls short, and how to get around those gaps. This post is part of a series that also covers attendance tracking in Moodle, Blackboard, and Brightspace.

How attendance works in Canvas

To compare attendance tools fairly, we use the same four criteria throughout this series, based on our guide to choosing attendance tracking software. A good attendance system should be:

• Fast and easy to use: recording attendance should only take a moment of class time.
• Accurate: the records should show who was really there.
• Flexible: it should work for small groups, large lectures and online classes alike.
• Reliable in its reporting: the data should be clean enough for advisors, programme leads and compliance teams to use.

So how does Canvas do? Canvas has its own attendance tool called Roll Call, which appears as “Attendance” in the course menu. It is included in Canvas, but your administrator has to enable it first. After that, teachers don’t need to set anything up and can start taking attendance right away. It also works in the Canvas Teacher app for iOS and Android, so attendance can be taken from a phone as well.

Setting up sessions and statuses

In Roll Call, you don’t create sessions in advance. The tool opens on today’s date, and you can move to another day using the arrows or the calendar. Attendance can be taken on any day of the week, and only the days on which you actually take attendance count toward the grade. So if a class is cancelled, it doesn’t affect anyone’s score.

There are four statuses: Present, Absent, Late, and Unmarked. Canvas has no separate status for excused absences; instead, you leave the student unmarked. Being late counts as 80% by default, and you can change this in the settings. If you don’t want attendance to count toward the final grade, you can switch that off with a checkbox. Teachers can also give students badges, for example “participated” or “left early”, to add information the statuses don’t cover.

Taking attendance

The teacher takes attendance by clicking on each student, and each click changes the status. The fastest way is to use “Mark All Present” and then correct the students who are absent or late. In the Teacher app, there’s also a “Mark Remaining as Present” button for everyone you haven’t marked yet. Teachers can also switch to the Class View, which shows students in a seating chart, so empty seats are easy to spot. In a small group, this is quick and simple. In a large lecture, though, this method doesn’t work. With 150 students, it would take forever and would most likely be inaccurate. For bigger classes, many lecturers fall back on the classic paper method. It’s accurate, but it has its own flaws, which we’ll explore in the next section.

Reports and grades

When you take attendance for the first time, Canvas adds an attendance assignment to the gradebook, and the grades update automatically from then on. Students can see their own attendance and grade in the assignment details. Since Roll Call only shows one day at a time, you need a report to see attendance over a longer period. You can filter reports by date range or student, and they are sent to you by email as a CSV file. Administrators can also run a report for the whole account, covering all courses, teachers and students. Either way, you get raw data in a spreadsheet. Spotting patterns, like a student missing classes in several courses, is still up to you.

Where Canvas attendance tracking tool falls short 

Canvas’s Roll Call has a lot of good functionalities. It’s ready to use as soon as your administrator switches it on; it works on a phone, the seating chart makes gaps in the room easy to spot, and cancelled classes don’t count against anyone’s grade. For smaller seminars, it has all the features a good attendance tracking system needs. But where it struggles is in large lectures and in the reliability of the data it produces.

Accuracy and speed

Because students can’t check themselves in, every attendance record in Roll Call depends on the teacher. With 150 students, clicking through the list takes too long, and recognising every face is unrealistic. In this case, the lecturers have to fall back on a paper sign-in sheet. 

The paper sign-in sheet method has not only accuracy problems, since when you pass a sheet around the room there is no way of checking who is actually signing it. This means that writing down a friend’s name takes seconds, as we explain in our article on proxy attendance. But it is also slower and most importantly, creates a lot of manual work afterwards, since someone still has to read the handwriting and enter every name into Canvas to have a comprehensive attendance database.

Reliability in its reporting

Here, Canvas has two issues that are easy to overlook. The first concerns courses with several sections, such as a lecture combined with labs or tutorials. According to the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Roll Call “cannot track a student’s attendance across multiple sections within the same Canvas course”, and the gradebook simply shows the score from whichever section was updated most recently. For a student who attends both a lecture and a lab, the attendance grade can therefore change depending on which section the teacher marked last.

Apart from that, the reporting, while being much better than in most other LMS systems, as administrators can pull a report covering every course in the account, still has room for improvement. The reports arrive by email as raw CSV files, at course level for teachers and at account level for administrators. The data is there, but turning it into answers, such as which students are missing classes across several courses, still means opening spreadsheets and doing the analysis yourself.

How to improve attendance tracking in Canvas

To build on all the well-thought-out features of the Canvas attendance tracking system and eliminate some of the weaknesses, we built an integration at Attendance Radar. The idea is simple: Canvas stays the place where you teach, grade, and communicate, and Attendance Radar handles the attendance itself. Accuracy and speed. Instead of a paper sheet or clicking through a list of names, students check themselves in with their phones. The teacher’s phone sends out a Bluetooth signal, and only students within range of that signal can register. A full lecture hall can check in within the same few minutes, and there’s no stack of signatures to type up after class. Writing a friend’s name on a sheet takes seconds; checking them in remotely isn’t possible, as the signal can’t be forwarded and each device can only be used once per session. Late arrivals can be captured with a separate late scan that marks them as late automatically. Reducing proxy attendance to a minimum. 

When it comes to reporting, Attendance Radar goes further than a CSV file in your inbox. Through our API, institutions can feed attendance records directly into their own systems, so advisors, programme leads and international offices work with up-to-date data centrally instead of collecting exports from individual courses. An administrator panel supports setup and user management across the institution. Teaching staff benefit as well: Attendance Radar shows attendance trends from session to session, lets teachers compare attendance across their courses and displays each student’s average attendance at a glance. When a spreadsheet is needed, a single Excel summary sheet covers all sessions of a course, statistics included.