Options for Taking Attendance and Engaging Students During Remote Instruction

If you are doing a live class through Zoom, you have the ability to create polls. You can use this function to take attendance as you would normally use an iClicker. With this feature, attendees answer a question and their names and responses are recorded. Zoom does not integrate with Canvas the way iClickers do, so you will not be able to automatically record who is and is not present. However, you can copy and paste all respondents into an Excel sheet and create count functions to keep track of how many classes each student attends. While instructors are discouraged from assigning points for attending synchronously, using live polls is a good way to keep track of who can attend synchronously as well as who may be having a difficult time with the course content. During this time, students may have limited access to the internet or to a quiet space. They may also be supporting family, friends, or relatives during this time which may impact when they can fully engage in class.

Poll asynchronously. If a student cannot attend a live lecture or you are pre-recording all your lectures, polls can still be useful for encouraging and recording attendance. Through Canvas, create weekly polls that function as low or no-stakes quizzes on one important thing you would like your students to get out of that particular class. If you are preparing in advance, you could ask a more challenging question, but go over the answer in the lecture. This method of using polls not only allows you to take attendance, but also provides you and your students with feedback on what they are learning. Make sure that your students will have access to the lecture recordings by recording via Kaltura Capture or the Zoom App. Zoom will store them for 30 days in its cloud or you can use Kaltura to record your live lectures, which will be stored in “My Media” on Canvas. As with any quiz on Canvas, you can set a due date.

⏳ Muddiest point: At the end of each lecture, or viewing of a recorded lecture, students write one or two sentences saying which concept or point they found the most confusing and why. 

⏳⏳ Exit ticket: At the end of each discussion section or lecture, or viewing of a recorded lecture, students fill out a survey that asks them to write short answers to questions like. Check out this sample exit ticket for inspiration. Remember, if you do ask students how they are doing, be prepared to follow-up either with the whole class or individually to either acknowledge their experience or to direct them to additional resources such as CAPS or one of UC San Diego’s tutoring programs such as the Teaching + Learning Commons Academic Achievement Hub’s Content Tutoring.      

⏳⏳⏳ 5-minute paper: Once a week, or after each class, ask students to write about 100 words explaining their favorite concept, point, topic, reading, or skill they covered. You can also use the 5-minute paper after exams to encourage them to reflect on their approach to studying and learning. 

⏳⏳⏳⏳ Blogging: Once a week, have students write about a concept in a way that explains it to a public audience. Encourage students to use a platform of their choice to teach people outside of UC San Diego something. This can both be a means of taking attendance and a substantive assignment. Do encourage students to bring in their passion for journalism, photography, drawing, video production, live streaming, and community engagement. This would be a serious time investment on you and/or your IA’s end for assessing, so plan accordingly.

You may want to use written reflections if you primarily want students to come away being able to build on foundational concepts or use a concept or skill for a particular purpose. This is common in intermediate to advanced courses or ones that emphasize skill development.

You may want to use concept maps if you primarily want students to come away with a fine-grained appreciation for how concepts, theories, and skills relate to each other. This is common in topics courses or seminar-style classes.

• For an assignment that students can do on their own, consider giving them a weekly prompt or problem that either does not have enough information to be solved or is complicated or ambiguous enough that there can be multiple ways of approaching it. Ask students to write a bullet-point argument outline for what additional information they would need to solve the problem and how they would solve it if they had that additional information. Alternatively, for a prompt, ask them to create a bullet-point argument outline for why their approach or interpretation is the right one. They can upload this to Turnitin via Canvas each week. As a plus, you will get a window into how they are understanding the course content and have student-created material you can draw on in lecture.
• For an assignment that students can do with others, consider using Canvas’s discussion board feature. As with the previous example, create either a problem or prompt that either does not have enough information or is ambiguous or complicated enough to support more than one approach to addressing it. Have students write paragraph-long posts arguing for what information they would need to solve the problem or an argument for why their particular interpretation and approach are the correct ones to take. You can also assign people in advance to a particular position. Once students post their responses, they must substantively respond to at least two other students’ posts or responses. You are welcome to add additional incentives, like extra participation points, or honorary titles. IAs or instructors can click through individual students to see their discussion board activities and allot points accordingly.

You may want to use position-taking assignments if you primarily want students to come away having developed their critical-thinking and analytical skills. These are skills that many majors seek to cultivate and for which many employers look in job candidates. These activities can be modified so they are section-based for large lectures classes. Instructors and IAs can also provide more or less scaffolding depending on the level of the course.

  📸 After each lecture, or viewing of a recorded lecture, ask students to take a picture or draw something that represents either how they are doing or a concept you covered that day. They can post this to a discussion board on Canvas or you can make it an official assignment that they turn in. To keep it low-stakes, grade for completion. However, to incentive quality posts, consider assigning bonus points to particularly creative or thoughtful creations.

✐📓 Put students in small groups and ask them to collaboratively take notes on the homework and lectures. You can use a Google Document to keep track of who is contributing. Not only will you be helping your students develop valuable soft skills of teamwork, collaboration, and professionalism, you will be giving your students a chance to be a resource to each other.

You may want to use community creation assignments or activities if you primarily want students to come away with tangible products and concrete connections to each other and the world. This is applicable for almost all classes; however, the time commitment to developing and responding to these activities is worth considering before deciding to what extent you want to implement them.

Trying anything new in the classroom can be an emotionally and mentally challenging experience. Attempting several new things at once exponentially increases that challenge. It is unrealistic to expect perfection from yourself and now even more so. However, showing up to your class and acknowledging the challenges of this experience will do wonders for bringing you and your students together. The vast majority of your students are on your team and want to support you and their classmates. Take a moment before each class to recognize your own accomplishment of showing up and doing your best. By picking one of the methods above, you’ll have a way of keeping track of who is participating in your class so you can focus on being present (synchronously or asynchronously!) with your students. We are cheering you on and are here to support you. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us at engagedteaching@ucsd.edu.