Attendance Policy for Students/Formerly No-Show

Hi Everyone-

My apologies for the long email.  The attendance procedure is towards the end. Census date is Tuesday, September 14th.

This year the former No-Show Policy has changed to the Attendance Policy.  There are several reasons for the change.  First,  online classes are a target for groups who are interested in fraudulently applying for financial aid.  Because of this we are attempting to verify class attendance of all students early in the semester.  Initially we ran a no-show report and labeled those who did not login to class at all as no-shows and recommended to the colleges that they drop these students.  The majority of the financial aid scams however have involved "students" who do login to class.  Many of them also participate in the Introductory Discussion, but few participate beyond that.  

Second,  as you know, many of the colleges we serve do not drop students for no-show.  Our preference at CCCOnline is that students are dropped for non-attendance, but before we can request that of all of the colleges we need to collect data showing that most students who either do not attend at all or only login a couple of times are not successful in their courses.  The new policy and procedure will help with that.

Last,  online education in general is at risk whenever we can't verify that our students are who they say they are and that we know who is completing the courses.  We have designed courses in such a way that makes it likely that the student who begins the course also finishes it.  In addition, we are working with Acxiom, a company that collects large amounts of public information about people, to introduce a set of identity questions upon login to D2L sometime during the first couple of weeks of classes.  We may have that project in place for fall 2, but it is not complete at this time.

We expect to report back to you on the data and analysis of this new process in February of next year.

Attendance Policy

CCCOnline's attendance policy helps to identify students who do not intend to actively participate in courses.  If necessary, courses will need revised to comply with the Attendance Policy. Contact your Program Chair for guidance with necessary revisions.

To comply with this policy, each CCCOnline course must require students to:

1. Participate in an "Introductions" discussion, which may or may not be graded.

2. Submit a graded, content-related assessment prior to the census date.

 - The census date is the last day to drop in a term (see the Academic Calendar).
 - The assessment must be content related – it should not be a "syllabus quiz".
 - The assessment may be a Dropbox, Quiz, or Discussion

Process for verifying student attendance

Use the following instructions:

1. On or very shortly after the Census Date (Sept.14th), login to the Faculty Gateway: https://at.ccconline.org/faculty/

2. Click the "Online Roster" link.

3.  Click the "Attendance Register" link next to the title of the course.

4.  Click on the checkbox for “Introductory Discussion” if the student completed an Introductory Discussion post.

5. Click on the checkbox for “First Assignment” if the student has completed the first assignment (Recall that this assignment should be a graded, content-related assignment.).

6. Click on the checkbox for “Extenuating Circumstances” if the student did not post to the Introductory Discussion or the content-related assessment, but you have additional information that leads you to believe that the student may be active at a later date.  The “Extenuating Circumstances” designation might be selected, for example, if:

- The student communicated with you or class peers elsewhere in the course.
- The student notified you s/he will start the term late.
- The student has given you other reasons to expect s/he may become active.

7. After selecting the designation for each student, click the “Submit” button to save your selections.

Lisa 

Lisa Cheney-Steen

Co-Exec. Director for CCCOnline

Lisa.Cheney-Steen@cccs.edu