Top Hat - Taking Attendance with Top Hat in a Hybrid Course [UW-Madison]
This document explains how to conduct attendance in hybrid courses (mixed online and in-person) with Top Hat.
Enabling Hybrid Attendance
To enable hybrid attendance, instructors must first navigate to their Course Settings.
- To access course settings, select your name in the top-right corner of your Top Hat course page.
- Select Course Settings from the menu that appears
- From the Course Settings page, navigate to the Attendance tab.
- Select the Configure attendance for hybrid classes checkbox and then the Save button
- Once the setting is saved, the hybrid attendance configuration will apply to any attendance session launched in the Top Hat course. Instructors can find full details on how to launch attendance sessions in Professor: Taking attendance
What will students see?
When you enable hybrid attendance in your course, students will see the question, “Are you attending class in-person?”, below the attendance code field. Yes is auto-selected, so remote students will need to select the No response.
Note: Students submitting the attendance code via SMS text message cannot indicate whether they are attending class in-person. Please see Student: Attendance from Top Hat for full details on how to submit attendance as a student:
Reviewing Hybrid Attendance Records
Instructors can find records for any attendance sessions launched in Top Hat, using the Top Hat Gradebook.
- Selecting the Gradebook tab in the course header to navigate to your course gradebook.
- Check attendance by selecting the Attendance column. It will expand to reveal nested columns for each individual attendance session that has been run in the course.
- To see which students attended a class in-person, open the Attendance Report for the corresponding attendance session.
- Select the blue report icon at the top of the desired attendance session column
- Or select View Attendance Report from the modal that appears after clicking the column date header.
- Select the blue report icon at the top of the desired attendance session column
- Find the Response Time column on your Attendance Report. It will show whether a student attended in-person or remotely (next to the date and time stamp). Hybrid attendance records are also reflected in the Attendance section of individual Student Reports in the Gradebook.
