Proposed New Features

Introduction

Everyone who uses this plugin is encouraged to contribute ideas about increasing its capabilities and user-friendliness. Together we can decide on a first update for it. Please add to the list in the overview, then give a brief explanation of your idea in a H3 entitled section underneath. Additionally, feel most free to add more or help to clarify points that are already explained.

Overview

This page will explore features to enhance Moodle as a blended learning management solution. The module could have the following things in addition to its already wonderful features:

• Produce printable PDF rosters, timetables, and reports that can be styled and exported
• Create sessions by CSV
• Run a cron job that warns students and their instructors about exceeded absences
• Export all attendance data with group column or other profile information
• Have calculation functions for its grade component
• Better error checking
• Be optimized for taking attendance on a touchscreen device
• Usability tested for teachers/users
• Attendance import
• Compatibility with Badges

Printable PDF rosters

Some classrooms don't have wifi coverage, many teachers simply don't use a smartphone in class or simply prefer to keep paper records of their attendance. Additionally, classes may be cross proctored during tests and it is useful to produce styled printable documents for teachers to use. This will take a lot of the manual exporting and excel styling some schools do with rosters.

Create Sessions with CSV Import

By creating a CSV file to import sessions we can easily produce large amounts of sessions with mistakes. Currently it's a little counter-intuitive. Any update to the session creation options might consider simplifying this step.

Run a cron job to warn about excess absences

In some cases, students can fail a course if they do not complete a required amount of classes. A cron job might be able to send warnings to students and instructors of impending violations of this kind.

Grade calculations

Calculating a mark for participation and attendance isn't always straight forward. If we can have the ability to use some operators in the moodle interface, it could be a great advantage for students to see their final grade in real time.

Error checking

Many instructors are making the move to paperless records, however, the attendance plugin has a habit of not always completing its submission. This means at the end of a term, many teachers are surprised to find gaps in their attendance - the continue screen that follows the save submission might be involved, we're not sure. With some improved error and data caching (or something) we could ensure that attendance taken in the classroom is efficiently recorded 1st time. Nonetheless, it could just be user error :) We can't figure it out.

Touch-screen optimized

An optimized touch-screen view would be able to display names, photos, and a toggle button to move through the states that is a pleasure to use on a smartphone. Most instructors hit the little 'P' to mark all present then switch absent students. This could be improved with a large button at the top for 'All Present' or automatically mark all present when a session is opened - then one tap to mark absent and two taps for late etc.

Improved usability

Here a few ideas:

• Button for save and go to next session (for instructors that complete their attendance at the end of the week)
• A H2 tag placed on the session number and date on the taking screen.
• Customizable categories/tags for sessions (ie. turn columns on or off in the all sessions screen, and add new columns)