Released: April 6th, 2017

Attendance Tracking

Attendance tracking features can now be enabled within Aviso. Instructors may use Aviso to track attendance for the courses they are instructing.

Along with this, class meeting information is now being extracted from SIS. When this information is utilized, a slew of attendance features become visible to faculty.

Faculty see an "Attendance" item in the top navigation bar. This includes a badge that indicates the number of course sections that Aviso detects are missing attendance.

The instructor may click the "Attendance" navigation item to see an attendance dashboard. This gives the instructor a quick overview of their courses, and whether or not they have attendance to enter for the courses they are instructing in the current term.

Clicking on a course section (or meeting) brings the instructor to the new course roster page, which allows attendance to be tracked.

Navigating between meetings of the same course section can be done with the drop down menu, or by using the "Missing Attendance" widget.

An attendance trend indicator is visible for each student which gives a representation of the student's attendance record for that course section.

All the previous features of the course roster page have been ported to this new interface, including:

• The ability to send a message to all students on the roster of the course section.
• The ability to raise an early alert for a student.
• A risk indicator for each student.
• An early alert indicator for each student.

Attendance history is also accessible from the term tab on the student's profile page.

Note: For most current customers, the attendance information will not be displayed in 2.12 immediately. The roster page will appear similar to the screenshots in this document, but without attendance information displayed. Additional configuration and data integration work is required to enable the attendance module in the manner described above.

Excused Absences

Excused absences allow instructors and the automated attendance alerts to be aware of when a student is absent, but the absence is expected. For example, if a student is a part of a sports team that travels often, their absences in their course while the team is travelling are excused.

Creating excused absences is done by clicking on the "Attendance" navigation item, and then clicking the "Manage Excused Absences" link. (This assumes you have the appropriate permissions to manage excused absences, which is configured in Administration). An excused absences 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.

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

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.

Two attendance reports have been added to help gather attendance metrics. These are the Attendance Detail and Attendance Summary reports. Both of these reports support a number of filtering options and an Excel export function.

Course Meeting Schedules

Course meeting schedules are now displayed on the course roster page. (This assumes we are pulling course section meeting data from your SIS. Please contact your Aviso customer success representative to make sure this integration is initialized).

Style Changes

We made some minor user interface style changes to help with the overall look and feel of the software.

The home page received "panel" treatment to make the interface cleaner and easier to read. Here is an example of what it might look like for an instructor.

The same treatment has been applied to the Term tab on the student profile page. Again, this improves the readability of the information on this page greatly.

Academic Planning

(released in 2.11)

The new academic planning screen (accessible by staff if this is enabled) has been re-worked to improve the usability. The template that is selected for the student is now separate from the template used to find courses to add to the student's academic plan. This helps facilitate "what-if" scenarios if you have a student who is interested in pursuing another degree certification, or perhaps switching programs entirely. This can be used to explore these possibilities easily without changing the student's assigned academic plan template.

Selecting an academic plan template was quite difficult in 2.11, so we improved the UI in this area, complete with type-ahead search functionality. Simply click the pencil icon next to the template you'd like to change to access the new selector.

Indicators have been added to the right-hand sidebar on this page to make it much easier to see which courses are planned and completed.

Minor user interface improvements continue in the Academic Planning area, and we expect more smaller items to come in patch releases to 2.12.

Enrollment Report Active Date Range Filter

The Enrollment Report now has filtering active date range, and you can select the "Inactive" status in the status filter. This allows you to see students who are not active, but were active during some time period in the past.

Registration Activity Report

(released in 2.11)

This report can show registration activity including dropped and withdrawn courses. 

Telephone Integration

(released in 2.11)

When viewing a student's profile, the student's phone number is now a tel: link meaning if you are using a phone-enabled device or browser plugin (such as a smartphone, or Skype), you can click directly on this number to place a call to that student.

Absence Counts on Term Tab Updated

(released in 2.11 patch)

The term tab now counts number of days of absences rather than the total number of absences a student has. For example, if a student misses a lecture and a lab in the same day, this will appear as 1 day of absence rather than 2 absences.

Removal of Success Coach Assignment

(released in 2.11)

A student's Success Coach may be unassigned from the student's profile. Note: This can only be done by an administrator, and only if the student currently has an assigned Academic Advisor. Additionally, if this is set by the SIS import process, then this field cannot be edited through Aviso Engage.

Include Online Course Sections in Attendance Alerts

(released in 2.11)

Online course sections can now be included (optionally) in attendance alerts. This is done using a checkbox on the attendance alert configuration in the Administration portion of the software.