First Week Attendance Alert Troubleshooting

Overview

By design, the First Week Attendance automated alert will only run once on a course section in a current term.

• While enabled, the first week attendance automated alert will run on course sections in the current term and trigger a first week attendance alert only once on an individual course section IF the system finds at least one attendance record on the specific course section.
• There must be at least one attendance record on a course section in order for the alert to be triggered and sent to students that were absent during the first week of the course.
  • • Attendance records can be viewed from the Transcript Course Attendance Imported Data View, searching by the Course Section Source System Id. Click here to access this page within SS&E. 
    • The Course Section Source System Id can be found by searching for the course section in Course Section Administration. Click here to access this page within SS&E. 
• Person Alert Administration can be used to filter on the First Week Attendance alert type in order to see which/when students received an alert.
• The Attendance Summary Report can be run from SS&E Reporting (Built-In reports) to find missing attendance by term/course section/instructor.

When does the First Week Attendance automated alert run?

When the first week attendance automated alert runs depends on when the alert first finds at least one attendance record associated with a specific course section OR depending on the "N number of days since start of the term/course section" from the First Week Attendance Automated Alert settings.

• The first week attendance automated alert settings are configured by each individual institution.
• If there are no first-week attendance records associated with a course section, then the alert will not trigger. The reason for this is based on an assumption that either the course did not meet or the instructor has not yet entered any attendance tracking records for the specific course section.
• If the date is exactly on or past N days after the course section start date, as soon as at least one attendance record is added to the course section and the alert is enabled, this will trigger the alert to run.
• Once triggered, the first week attendance alert will not run again on a specific course section. The reason for this is based on an assumption that attendance is entered in a timely manner for all students. Therefore, once the alert is triggered, the assumption is that all first week attendance was captured, and the alert will not run again for the same course section.
  • • If the First Week Attendance automated alert has already run once on the course section in the current term, and there are new attendance record entries for the first week of the course section, there are usually other automated attendance alerts that will alert on missing attendance based on user-defined attendance alert rules.

Examples of "When will the First Week Attendance Alert run?"

To find the attendance data that triggers the first week attendance automated alert, the system looks at the start date of each course section in the current term and then adds N days, representing the "Number of Days Past Course Section Start Date to Run".

NOTE: The UI says "Number of days past term start date to run" however that is inaccurate, as the system will check every individual course section start date.

For example:

• If the first day of class is on January 8th, and the first week attendance alert is configured to run past 7 days, then 1/8 + 7 days = 1/15. What this means is that on or after January 15th, an alert will be sent to each student that was absent the first 7 days.
• If the first day of class is on January 8th, and the alert is configured to run past 3 days, then 1/8 + 3 days = 1/11. What this means is that on or after January 11th, an alert will be sent to each student that was absent on the first 3 days since the class started.
• If the first day of class is on January 11th and the alert is configured to run after 5 days, then the first week attendance alert will send out alerts on or after January 16th (1/11 + 5 = 1/16), for every student that was absent the first 5 days since the course section started.

Attendance Tracking - Timing Issues

• If a student's attendance record was entered very late on Jan 14th, and the alert ran early on 1/15, if some students already had attendance records saved in the database for this same course section, this will qualify the course section for a first week attendance alert. Depending on when and how late attendance records were entered/imported into SS&E will determine if these students receive an alert.
• If some students first week attendance records were not entered and/or imported into SS&E in a timely manner, as long as there is at least one attendance record found in the SS&E database for a specific course section, students will receive an alert for "missing attendance" during N days since the course section started.
• If the first day of class was on 1/10 and the alert is configured to run after 10 days, yet attendance was only entered for the very first time on 2/10, this will trigger first week attendance alerts to be sent on 2/10 for all students that are missing attendance records for all course section meeting dates between 1/10 and 1/20 (1/10 + 10 days).

Attendance Data Validation

Attendance data can be validated in the SIS when present, or within SS&E -> Admin -> SIS Integration -> Datafeeds -> by looking at the Transcript Course Attendance data.

Click here to search the Transcript Course Attendance Imported Data View.

• Replace yourInstitution with your school name that appears before .avisoapp.com on any working SS&E URL. For more information about fixing "yourInstitution" broken links, click here.

Attendance data can be searched on using the following fields:

• attendance_date - the course section scheduled meeting date
• status - the attendance status
• transcript_course_src_system_id - the enrollment record for a specific student/course section (found by searching Transcript Course for the student Id and course section Id)
• meeting type - the meeting type associated with the course section schedule Id
• course_section_schedule_element_src_system_id  - the course section schedule Id (found by searching Course Section Schedule Element for the course section Id)
• firstImportDate - the first date this attendance record was imported into SS&E
• lastImportDate -  the last date this attendance record was imported into SS&E

By checking the SIS and/or the Transcript Course Attendance data:

• Depending on the import dates, we may find that an attendance record was imported into SS&E after the first week attendance alert was triggered, which would explain why a student received a first week attendance alert even though they were present.
• If attendance is entered late for some students, the system will have already sent the first week attendance alert, and at the time, the system saw that the student was absent at all meetings between the course section start date until x days past the start of the course section.

Unexpected Results

• The course section meets on Wednesdays am and Thursdays pm. 
• The "first week" of the semester began on a Friday (Jan 8).
• The course section start date was set to 1/8.
• The course section had its first two meetings the following Wednesday (1/13) and Thursday (1/14).
• The alert triggered on the following Friday, as it was set to alert 7 days past the start of the course section (Friday 1/8 + 7 days = Friday 1/15).
• Depending on when the instructor entered all attendance records or updated absent attendance for students that were tardy, this may have unintentionally triggered the first-week attendance alert for students that were present.
• If some attendance entries occurred outside the "course section start date + N day" window, the system would have missed these attendance entries as they were imported or entered outside the time frame in which the alert was checking for students that missed all meetings during the first week of class, eg. at the time all meeting dates showed that the student was absent.