Managing Excused Absences

Overview

A short video demonstration can be found here

Excused absences allow instructors and the automated attendance alerts to be aware of when a student is absent, with an acceptable absence reason.

For example, if a student is a part of a sports team that travels often, absences from a course while the team is travelling are excused absences.

How to create an Excused Absence

Creating excused absences is done by clicking on the "Courses" page, and then clicking the "Excused Absences" link.

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  • Note: This assumes you have the appropriate permissions to manage excused absences, which is configured in Attendance Configuration Administration.

An excused absence consists of a name, one or many "periods" (date ranges) during which absences are excused, and one or many students to whom the absence applies. 

  • Students can be added individually by name or in bulk by selecting tags.

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An excused absence can also be easily created for a particular student by clicking the Excused Absence link on a student's profile page.

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If a student has an excused absence for a particular course meeting, the instructor can see this as indicated by the excused absence icon on the roster page. It is also indicated in the attendance trend indicator.

As periods on an excused absence approach, the instructors, advisors, and coaches may receive notifications (via the daily digest email) of the students that have an upcoming excused absence. An indicator will also appear in the news feed for these individuals.

 

Attendance Reports

Two attendance reports have been added to help gather attendance metrics. These are the:

  • Attendance Detail Report
  • Attendance Summary Report

Both of the reports support a number of filtering options and an Excel export function.

Attendance Alerts

Each Attendance Alert can optionally include a rule that includes excused absences when counting the number of absences.

  • By default, excused absences are NOT considered when counting the number of absences.

For more information about Attendance Alerts, click here.

 

 

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