Contact Tracing
This report cross references the students schedule and courses to determine who has crossed paths with who.
It can be refined by required attendance collection, however it can also work without attendance collection by assuming all students attended.
It can be refined by using seating plans by allowing you to select a certain number of seats radius that you would consider a close contact.
You must access the administrator portal and the report is located at Admin > Plug-Ins > Contact Tracing.
- Trace student(s): The student(s) to trace contacts for are entered at the top, or
- Trace instructor: An instructor can also be selected
- Attendance from - until: The date range that you would like to identify contacts for can be defined.
- Refine using seating plan: Choose whether you would like to refine using seating plans. This should be left off if you do no use seating charts, or use them sporadically. For more information on seating plans refer to 'Refine by Seating Plan' heading.
- Include subsequent sessions: Choose whether you would like to include subsequent sessions in the same location / room. This allows you to include students who may have been in the same room shortly after the student to be traced. Leave this off if you are not concerned about this.
- Attended statuses: Select the attendance statuses that indicate a physical attendance. This will apply to the infected student and the students who are close contacts. This could be setup to ignore any students who attended a session via Zoom for example.
- Treat no data as attended: Choose whether sessions that have no data, should be treated as everyone attending. If attendance is not recorded for a class, turning this on will cause the report to contact trace all students in the class since attendance cannot be used to refine it.
Courses and sessions attended by the students or instructor are shown with an indication of how many other students may have attended those sessions.
Refine the sessions that need to be included. You may choose to interview instructors in conjunction with this page, to try an eliminate any sessions where risk was very low for some reason (such as a well-ventilated lab, or where social distancing was maximized).
View the contacts of the ill student. Note the option to quickly retrieve the email addresses of these people. All tables can be extracted to excel or csv.
Seating plan refinement allows students seating position to be tracked, in order to refine the contact tracing.
Setup: The first step is to choose how the seating plan will be used.
Occasionally – this means that the seating plan does not persist from session to session. This option is useful when using contact tracing so that if the instructor is varying where people sit, that a previous plan does not inadvertently get used, therefore making contact tracing inaccurate.
Always – this means that the seating plan persists from session to session.
Student Defined – students will be able to define where they are sitting in the room via the student portal to aPlus+. This does rely on students taking care with their entry.
The room can then be setup. This is not designed to be an accurate floorplan of the room, rather, a way to determine, relatively, who sat close to someone else.
Students can then be setup with the seating plan by dragging and dropping them.
Attendance can still be collected via all of the options. Codes, Scanners, Manually. In fact, you can select the students in the seating plan to set their manual attendance if you wish.
If you are allowing students to set their location in the room, then they can do that via the code entry in the student portal in canvas. There may be challenges with this on a practical level as its relying on students to be careful about what they enter. Our current approach, is that if something non sensical makes its way into the students seat entry, then they would be considered as contacts by the contact tracing report on the tail end.
If a seating plan has been pre-defined, then students will be able to see their allocated seat here as well (this is not yet shown)
