August 11, 2021: Attendance Verification Quiz in Folio

Dear Faculty and Staff Instructors,

This is a quick reminder to make sure all courses are activated in Folio. This is in keeping with our commitment to making courses accessible and transparent to students.

As the recent message, “Information about the Course Search and Course Modalities”, from the reopening team mentioned, all students verify their attendance through the Attendance Verification Quiz in Folio. The LTS team has begun loading the Attendance Verification Quiz and “Quiz Announcement” News Item for all courses. In order to give students access to the Attendance Verification Quiz, the Folio section for your course must be Active. To double check whether your class is Active or not, go to “edit course” in your FOLIO section and click on “course offering information”.  Check the “course is active” box and hit Save.  

This non-credit quiz is auto-loaded into each Folio course, and will not require any additional set up by the instructor. The quiz will be available to students starting August 11 at 7:00am and it will end August 17 at 11:59pm (1 day after Drop/Add). It is imperative that you not adjust anything in this quiz (settings, grade, etc…) as this will break the automation and will cause a student to be dropped from the course. Instructors wishing to keep other content locked and still compose and leave modules in draft status. As you know, students having access to their grades on an ongoing basis is key to their success, so we encourage you to make use of the Folio gradebook.

Please remind your students about completing the attendance verification quiz throughout Drop/Add. 

Please be mindful of the following:

• The quiz must not be adjusted in any way. Any change to the quiz (settings, grade, etc…) renders it useless for reporting attendance, and will result in students not being verified.
• If a course is imported from a previous semester, the instructor should not include the previous Attendance Verification Quiz in that import.
• The quiz is not intended to replace “Day One” type assignments for engagement. Having an additional engagement assignment is perfectly fine, but it should not be used for attendance verification. Please do not label  “Day One” type assignments as Attendance. This has created confusion for students (especially in online courses). 
  • We know that taking attendance is an important part of getting to know your students, and this quiz is not intended to take the place of that kind of interaction. Please feel free to call roll, do introductions, or utilize any other first-day activities designed to engage students.
• Student reminder injections will start on the start date of the term (i.e., August 11 for full-term or minimester A; October for minimester B), and will end 1 day after the drop date (i.e., August 17 for full term, etc…).
• You will begin seeing an injection page in the MyGeorgiaSouthern portal alerting you about any students who have yet to complete the Attendance Verification Quiz on August 16. These injection pages will end on August 19.

Attendance verification is used for several important reasons, not the least of which is remaining in compliance with federal regulations (those also include reporting the ‘last day of attendance’ in cases where a student withdraws from the university). Perhaps most importantly to our students, financial aid cannot be released to a student’s account until their attendance has been verified. This quiz is the uniform tool for Attendance Verification and is used in every course.

Thank you,

Office of the Provost

Last updated: 8/13/2021