I’m big on simplicity, and letting the technology do the work. This is especially true when it comes to maintaining ILT attendance records. (Candidly, some of our instructors leave a lot to be desired in the “attention to detail” department.)
We’ve tried leaning in hard to letting course completion be based on attendance at the session level, and then letting event attendance being based on a percentage of time present. Our philosophy has typically been “if you were in the session for at least 80% of the time, you are marked present.”
Time in the meeting is determined via the Zoom V3 integration, and for some users it works well. Other times though, it goes off the rails, and users submit tickets because they attended the session but didn’t get credit. After looking into it, I’ve found two common problems…
- Instructors are starting the session early so they can prepare before it begins. In this case, if an instructor logs in early, the meeting time increases. For example, 80% of an hour-long event is 50 minutes. But if the instructor starts the session 30 minutes early to do tech checks, get their confidence ready, etc., then Zoom records the total time as 90 minutes, and determines that 80% of that is 1 hour, 12 minutes. Now, any learner who logs in less than twelve minutes early is no longer meeting the threshold.
- When a session finishes early, the total scheduled time is maintained. If we use the previous example, a learner must join for 50 minutes to get attendance credit. If the class is small (and quiet), the session might not take a full 60-minutes. If the instructor ends class more than 10 minutes early, no one meets the minimum threshhold.
These are so circumstantial, so I don’t expect Docebo to really account for these nuances. That said, I do think I need to find a more sustainable attendance approach and suggest it to our instructors.
I’m curious what your ILT attendance philosophy is and how you manage it both on- and off-platform.