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Proposed New Features
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.
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:
- Create classes/groups of students based on Groups of enrolled students in Moodle.
- 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 optimised for taking attendance on a touchscreen device
- Usability tested for teachers/users
- Attendance import
- Compatibility with Badges
- Link to Events in Course Calendar
In some cases, students having to attend a session/lecture are coming from different groups in an institution, therefore it would be useful to have these groups of students automatically identified in auto_attendance module. At the moment it takes a huge amount of time to select every single student by clicking next to their name to create groups/classes.
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.
By creating a CSV file to import sessions we can easily produce large amounts of sessions without mistakes. Currently it's a little counter-intuitive. Any update to the session creation options might consider simplifying this step.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
The mod showing the Attendance grade in Sessions at the report-page for any different student. It would be a great feature to see the Attendance Grade in hours. Not all sessions have the same duration!
Add a feature that allows to use existing events in the course's calendar as sessions. This would greatly simplify the creation of sessions for sites keeping the class schedule in Moodle. Also it would greatly reduce data redundancy and also doesn't require the teacher to change events/sessions in two places in case a lecture is rescheduled.