Once you navigate to the Attendance page, marking student attendance is the same whether you are using Learn Ultra or Original. Progress Tracking is a new feature for instructors and students to track progress through individual course content in Learn Ultra.
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Additional Resources
🚩For Blackboard Original courses, see the following:
🏴This information applies only to Blackboard Learn Ultra.
Attendance can be added as a part of the students' overall grade. Students can view their class attendance and graded attendance appears as a single column in the gradebook.
Progress Tracking can be enabled to view interaction with course content. You and students can view three levels of progress with improved tracking for learning modules.
Attendance
For each class meeting, you can mark whether a student is present, late, absent, or excused.
From the Details & Actions menu, under Attendance, click Mark attendance
Add Attendance to the Gradebook
When you access Attendance for the first time, you can decide if you want to add attendance to your gradebook. From the Attendance page, select Add Attendance to open the Settings panel.
- You can change the default Attendance Values for Late attendance in the grade schema
- You can't change the percentages for Present, Absent, and Excused at this time
- Excused counts as Present for scoring purposes
- You can choose whether to include Excused in calculations
- You can select to Use attendance as a grade
- You can also Select a grading scale for the overall grade
- Letter, Points, or Percentage
- Save your settings or close the panel if you don't want to make changes
- An attendance column will appear in the gradebook
Overall view
In the Overall view, you can mark attendance, view attendance history, view class summary statistics, and create new meetings.
The most recent meeting you need to mark appears on the right side of the screen.
As you mark student attendance, their attendance grades are posted automatically. If you change students' attendance or clear marks, students see the changes immediately.
Meeting view
To save time, you can use the meeting view column heading to mark all students present or absent, then change each individual student status as necessary. Your work is saved for you as you make changes.
In Meeting view, scores are always percentages regardless of the schema you chose in the Settings panel.
Since the Meeting view only shows one status, you'll see the percentage because it's the weight of that one status.
At any time, you can change the schema or Remove attendance in the Settings panel, Save, and refresh the page. You'll see your newly selected schema reflected on the Attendance page in the Overall view.
Add Attendance from the Gradebook
In a new course where no grades exist in the gradebook, you can select to Add Attendance.
When other grades exist, you can also add attendance in the following ways:
- In grid view, select the plus sign next to an existing column to open the menu and Add Attendance
- In list view, select the plus sign wherever you want to add attendance and select Add Attendance
In grid view, you can't edit attendance cells. Select a student's attendance cell and select View student record to view a summary of the student's overall attendance record. You can see how many class meetings the student has missed. The student's Overall Score appears with the schema you chose in the Settings panel. This view is read-only.
Student View of Attendance
Students select the Gradebook icon on the navigation bar to access Course Grades page and view their overall attendance grade.
- Students can select Attendance to open up the panel to view details of each course meeting
- Students can view a summary to see how many class meetings they’ve missed
Export Attendance Data
In the Overall view, select the Export icon to download a CSV file for attendance records. The download begins immediately without confirmation.
Progress Tracking
From the Details & Actions menu, you can Turn on progress tracking for your course content.
- Once the student has submitted, assessments, tests, journals, or discussions will be automatically marked as complete
- Students can mark documents, uploaded files, or links complete once they have opened them
- The entire folder is automatically marked as complete when all items in a Folder or Module have been completed
- Learning Modules have additional start, continue, and complete options
For the student, a circle icon indicates the their progress through the course content:
- Empty when the student has not accessed the content
- Partially filled when a student has opened the content
- A green checkmark when the student has completed the content
Learning Modules have improved progress tracking for students:
You can track student progress for the following types of content:
- Ultra Documents
- SCORM packages
- Uploaded files
- Links
- Cloud documents
- LTI content with no associated grade
- Learning modules
- Folders
Progress tab
You can view individual student progress by selecting Progress from the a student overview. The status column includes status, date, and time.
- Unopened
- Started
- Completed
The Progress tab only includes content Visible to students by default. If a student can't access content because they don't meet release conditions yet, this is shown. You can change the tab to display All content, the content the student can't see is marked with a not visible icon. Content marked not visible either isn't viewable to students or it's hidden until students meet the release conditions.
Student Progress Report
You can view how students engage with course content.
There are two ways to access this report:
- Select the ellipsis menu by the content and then select Student Progress
- Select the content and then select the Student Progress tab
Sort by student name or progress status to send an individual or bulk message.