News & Updates

How to Track Laboratory and Self-Study Attendance in Your Language School

By Paolo Dona — Nov 18, 2010

For many language schools, tracking attendance correctly is vital. If you are enrolling visa students, at any given time, you may need to know how many hours the student is required to attend, how many hours have been attended, and the relative percentage.

Although this is fairly straightforward for standard classes taught regularly throughout the week at the same predefined times, it can be difficult if you give your students the ability to make up hours with laboratory or self-study classes.

A laboratory is a room or designated area inside the school where your students can use personal computers, reading material, or other tools provided by the school.

Self-study classes are special classes in which the students read, speak with other students or teachers, or study on their own as part of a program defined by the school.

In either case, you may want to track how many hours the student studied, and take thouse hours into account in the attendance percentage calculation (e.g., 10 hrs/week).

This is a convenient way to give your students an opportunity to recoup missed lessons.

NiftySchool allows you to create special ‘Laboratory’ classes that can be used for this purpose. Let’s see how they work:

1) Go to the ‘Classes’ tab, and click on ‘Add lab class’:

Lab classes are not bound to specific times of the day because students can enter and exit at their will (or according to the school rules).

2) Add students to the laboratory class:

Add students to the laboratory as you would normally do with a fixed class. You can also set an expected ‘weekly goal’ for each student; it will be used to compute his expected number of hours.

For example if you set a goal of 10 hours per week for a student, he will reach 100% attendance only after spending 10 hours in the laboratory. It does not matter if the 10 hours are completed in one day or spread evenly across the week as long as the student meets the goal.

Weekly goals can differ among students, but you can keep them all in the same laboratory/self-study class for your convenience or split them into more than one lab class.

3) Track how many hours and minutes have been attended:

On a daily basis, you can enter the time spent in the laboratory or self-studying, using the “Xh Ym” format. You can be as precise as you want: the percentage calculation will be accurate to the minute! If you want to input two and a half hours, you can specify the attendance as ‘2h 30m’, ‘2.5h’, or ‘150m’.

Attendance can exceed the weekly goal, allowing students to recoup previous poor attendance. Please note that this could potentially bring the percentage above 100% (which means the student is attending more than expected).

Zero-hrs/week lab enrollments are also supported. You can use this option when students are not strictly required to self-study.

4) Enjoy precise attendance reporting:

Once a laboratory/self-study enrollment has been set up, the student’s calendar will be updated to reflect the new expected attendance.
You can then edit the student’s attendance just as you do for standard and Callan method classes.

Happy laboratory and self-study classes tracking!