With Attendance Code Entry, teachers are able to obtain unique codes for each attendance session they are teaching, and can provide those to students. Students can then enter the relevant code against their session to have their attendance recorded.

If students have not entered a code their attendance can be set to an absent status automatically after the session has finished.

Teachers can have manual control over when the code for each session is available so for example they could open a 2 minute code entry window and provide the code to students with the expectation that they enter the code within that window - making it more difficult to share the code with students who may not be in class.

The IP address of students can also be recorded with codes are entered.

Attendance Codes can be obtained from the Course > Attendance tab by clicking the Codes option.

This opens a list of attendance codes for sessions for today and the following two days. The closest session is indicated by a reddish colour.

If the setting Enable manual entry window control is enabled, then teachers have some options to control when the codes can be entered. Click the icon on the far right of a session as indicated below. Note this is not available if the setting to enable manual control is not set to yes.

This is the default and the time entry window is determined by the Accessible minutes before start and Accessible minutes after start settings.

Codes can only be entered after you click the 'Start' button and before the timer has counted down or you click the 'Stop' button. This allows you to allow code entry for a 2 minute period  (or any number of minutes) from when you make the code available, and you have the option to stop before that 2 minutes has finished. You can stop earlier and start again. In the screen below you can see a 2 minute code entry window which has started and is counting down.

Specify the from and until times in advance, and students will only be able to enter codes during that time window.

This option disables code entry for the selected session.

Student's may access code enntry screen from their student interface.

A list of sessions across all courses for the current day can be selected from, with today selected by default. There are settings which determine how many days sessions can be shown for. Students may be able to see their sessions for past days and future days, or just for the current day.

Depending on configured settings, students may be able to enter a code against a session, depending on whether the current time is before or after the start of the session and by how many minutes before or after. This is affected by the kind of code entry the teacher may have chosen.

When a code is successfully entered the student will have an attended or late status recorded for the session depending on the configuration.

Open the attendance session history you can see the time a code was entered. The note Self tracked indicates the code was entered by the student. If IP address tracking is enabled the note will include the student's IP address.

Currently this is not possible.

An absent status can be applied automatically for students who do not enter a code. This is not enabled by default and must be enabled by an administrator. Refer to the heading Absence Code Scheduling below.

Faculty members do not need to manually enter students as absent.

Only System Administrators can access the Attendance Codes Administration area, from Admin > Plug-ins > Attendance Codes.

We recommend that special attendance statuses be set aside for use with code entry. By default there will be two statuses named 'Absent - code'' and 'Attended - code' both of which are hidden from selection and configured to be applied for attendance code entry. Using these special statuses allows you to differentiate between attendance recorded manually and attendance recorded automatically by code entry. Take care changing the names of these statuses because there are settings which need to match these attendance status names.

The currently applied settings are shown on the left of the administration page. Check the settings here to verify that what you have configured is effective. If a change to settings is not reflected on this page, edit and save the setting again.

If you would like an absent status to be applied for students who did not successfully enter a code, you must schedule when this is applied. This is configured at Admin > Plug-Ins > Attendance Codes under the Absence Code Scheduling heading.

This could be scheduled to occur every hour, a few times each day or daily. You may prefer to leave attendance as blank until the end of the day or you may prefer to have blank attendance replaced with an absent status fairly soon after each session finishes in which case you would want to schedule this to run frequently during the day.

When this schedule runs, it will look back over the last 24 hours and apply the absent status as necessary. This is affected by a few settings - check the settings section to make sure the absent status will be applied as you require.

Settings can be edited at Admin > Plug-ins > Plug-in Settings > Attendance Codes.