Student Emailing
Student Absence emails allow automated emailing rules to be setup, that will email students if their attendance breaches your defined attendance thresholds. Course instructors/faculty, can also be included on these alerts, as can other elected admin users. This feature is often used as an automated partner to the administrator reporting.
Alerts can be setup by course or Canvas subaccount.
Alerts that a student has received, can be viewed on the student profile page, under Attendance Alerts.
Important Notes:
When using this feature for the first time, please ask your account rep to ensure the student emailing is enabled in the admin settings.
When an alert has been saved – Upon reopening it, a “Preview emails…” link will be available at the top. This allows you to see who would be emailed by this rule, without triggering the sending of emails. We highly recommend that you use this feature to test your rule prior to activating it.
In the admin portal, navigate to Admin -> Student Absence Emails
Your existing rules/alerts and the option to create a new one, are on the right hand side.
Name: A useful name for future reference. This will show as the name of this alert on the main alerts page.
Run Schedule: Setup the schedule for how often this rule should run.
This can be setup to run at many different intervals. From multiple times a day (useful for immediate absence alerts), to daily/weekly/monthly (useful for calculation type alerts)
Example - Multiple times a day (every 60 minutes for 10 hours)
Example - Weekly every Friday.
Schedule Enabled: Enable or disable the rule (this can also be achieved by using the "run until" option in the scheduling)
Courses: Choose whether this is a global alert that runs for all currently active courses, or if it should apply to just some courses/departments.
All current courses: Applies this rule to all courses that are currently active across aPlus+ Attendance.
Specify course selection: Specify the courses / sub-accounts that this alert should apply to. Selecting this will open a course selection popup. Select the blue box to change this selection.
Students: This section allows you to choose the rule that will be used to identify the students that should be sent the alert.
Low attendance rate overall of by course, by day count
Looks for a breach of an attendance rate over a defined lookback day period. This can be by course or overall. This rule is useful for determining attendance attendance drop-off over a recent period. For example, if a student stops showing up over a week, they can be alerted (along with those those who are monitoring these alert.
If using this feature to sending an immediate alert following an absence on the current day, the "Take into account last:" can be set to 0.
Take into account last: The number of days that the rule should consider.
Overall attendance rate: Consider the students attendance rate across all courses
Course attendance rate: Consider the student attendance rate across each course separately
Consecutive Absences overall, by day count
Looks for a breach of consecutive absences across all of a students courses, over a number of days looking back.
Take into account last: The number of days that the rule should consider.
Consecutive absences: The number of consecutive absences to look for
Group by day: Choose whether multiple consecutive absences in a single day are treated as a single consecutive absence. This may be helpful if a student has many sessions in one day, where a single day absent would otherwise be considered many consecutive absences.
Low Attendance Rate, overall, to date
Looks for breach in a defined attendance rate over the full duration of all of a students active courses.
Low attendance rate, by course, to date
Looks for a breach of a defined attendance rate, by course.
Low attendance rate (proportion of total sessions) overall, by course
Looks for a breach in a students attendance rate, whether overall, or by course, as a proportion of all sessions past and future. This is useful if a course has a minimum attendance requirement. This rule allows a student to be identified if they are approaching the point of no return with respect to attendance. If a student attends all future sessions, their attendance rate cannot improve.
Exclude withdrawn Enrolments: This should be set to true to prevent student/courses being included, if the student has been marked as withdrawn from the course.
There are several options for defining the circumstances for which a student should receive an email. These are best summarized by the onscreen text.
- Send student email to: this will typically be set to “Students Email Address”, unless you have a special configuration for sending emails to parents or observers. If you would like to use an attribute that is not the students default email address, please contact your aPlus+ representative.
- Email course staff: this allows instructors/faculty, who are assigned as teachers to a course, to be sent a summary of students who have breached this alert, for their course. If the alert is setup as an 'overall' rule that looks across many courses, all instructors/faculty who teach any course that a student is enrolled in, will receive the alert. The format of this can be previewed using the preview option after an alert has been saved.
- Include Recent Attendance: Includes a recent attendance history in the email to the students, allowing them to see why they may be receiving this email. The number of days of history the email includes, can also be set.
- Email Frequency: Defining whether students receive the email just once, every time the rule runs, or just each independent time they breach the rule after recovering.
- Email Subject: Subject line of the email
- Email Summary to: The email address entered here, will receive a bullet point list of the students who were emailed by each run.
- Copy Student email(s) to (optional): The email address entered here will receive a copy of EVERY email that is sent.
- Email Message: Email text can be formatted to including links, and use mail merge fields to personalise the email.
To review which emails a student has recieved, open the Absence Emails tab on a students profile. This will show the date and time of each email that has been sent.
Click on the email link to see the content of the email that was sent.
