Moodle's Attendance activity can be used to track student attendance in a course. During a class session, instructors can mark students with various status sets as defined by the instructor. The class session can be configured to automatically mark students with a status if their attendance status is not reported during the class session.

This article provides guidance on setting up the Attendance activity to mark students absent automatically.

Automatically Marking Students as Absent Using Attendance

To automatically mark students as absent using the Attendance activity, two steps must be completed:

• The status used to represent absences must have Automatically set when not marked enabled.
• The class sessions used to mark attendance must have Automatic marking enabled.

Both options can be configured during the creation of the Attendance activity, or later, when Attendance has already been created and should be reconfigured.

The Attendance activity, by default, contains a status set labeled PLEA for the following statuses:

• Present
• Late
• Excused
• Absent

The Absent status in this default set applies 0 points to the class session, and will be used to automatically mark each student in a class session that didn't have a status selected at the end time of the class session.

These instructions can be used for any status in the set, or any customized status, but only one status can be used for automatic marking.

Configuring the Absent Status

To configure the Absent status to be automatically marked at the end of the class session:

1. Navigate to the Attendance activity.
2. In the Attendance menu at the top of the page, select the More tab.
3. In the drop-down menu, select the Status set option.
4. In the table of statuses, find the row for the Absent status.
5. Under the Automatically set when not marked header, in that row, use the radial to select that status.
6. Click the Update button.

This will set the Absent status to be used when the student does not have a marked status at the end of a class session.

Configuring the Class Session

Class sessions can be created or reconfigured with automatic marking. This enables the class session to automatically set the Absent status (or any other status enabled to Automatically set when not marked) for any student without a set status by the end time of the session.

• To create the class session, in the main Attendance page, click the Add session button.
• To reconfigure a class session, in the main Attendance page, click the Edit session icon (which looks like a gear) in that class session's row.

Then, enable automatic marking:

1. In the class session's settings page, find and expand the Student recording section.
2. Set Automatic marking to the Set unmarked at end of session option.
3. Click the Save changes button.

This will set that class session (and any other recurring sessions created with that session) to use automatic marking with the Absent status for any students who have not had a status marked for Attendance at the end of the class session.

Additional Resources

Using the Attendance Activity in Moodle (DELTA Knowledge Base)

For additional assistance, please contact the LearnTech Help Desk at learntech@ncsu.edu or (919) 513-7094, or via the Get Help form on the DELTA Knowledge Base.