News & Updates

Improved Student Attendance

By Paolo Dona — Apr 12, 2010

Hello — today, we’re releasing a few improvements to the student attendance screen. Feedback from our users made clear that a few refinements were needed, and we’re glad to announce that they are ready to be released.

NiftySchool has two primary ways to manage student attendance:

From the class register, attendance can be set for a specific day/class.
From the student profile, multiple attendances can be set from a calendar-like view.

The updates regarding the student calendar view are as follows:

Months are now shown in reverse order
Weeks without enrolments/attendance are hidden
Partial attendances are now highlighted
Additional attendance details
Additional attendance hours summaries

Let’s explore these details further:

Months are now shown in reverse order

Months were previously shown in ascending order (Jan, Feb, Mar and so on). This made perfect sense, but it was difficult to quickly see the latest attendance details spanning several months.

You needed to scoll to the bottom of the page to view the most recent month. This was quite irritating for long attendance periods.

Now you’ll find the last month at the top of the page, and you can scroll down to review previous months’ attendance details.

Weeks without enrolments are hidden

When enrolments didn’t cover a whole month, the calendar ended up wasting lots of screen space, showing ‘empty’ days.

Now, weeks without enrolments or attendances are hidden so that the calendar looks more compact and easier to understand.

Partial attendances are shown in orange

For Callan schools, it was difficult to distinguish between full attendances (two hours) and partial attendances (first or second hour only): they were all shown in green.

Now, partial attendances are shown in orange: it is then very easy to spot them at a glance between the full attendances.

Please note that attendances are shown as partial only if the student is supposed to attend both hours (According to the enrolment setup).

Attendance details/explanation

In certain instances, it was formerly unclear how many hours a student was supposed to attend class on a given day. This happens, for example, when an enrollment status is changed, but the student remains in the same class.

For instance: A student attending only one hour for a period and then switching to a full attendance will show full attendances (green boxes), but a different number of attended hours, which can be confusing.

After Clicking on an attendance box, a popup will tell you how many hours the student was expected to attend, versus how many hours have actually been attended.

A link will also allow you to go to the class register for that day to double-check any relevant class notes.

Attendance summaries

One of the most important things about tracking attendances is being able to see how many hours/days a student has attended during a given period of time.

This is useful to reconcile the payments received and to ensure visa students have completed the minimum number of hours required.

The new features have been applied automatically to all accounts, so no action is required on your side to start using them.
This is the beauty of having your management software hosted online — you always have the latest and most updated version without any hassles.

We hope you enjoy the updates, and if you have any questions, feel free to add a comment using the form below.