Tracking attedance for weekly/daily tutoring sessions

[jayzala]

Hi All,

I am looking for some direction for a way to track attendance for participants in an after school tutoring and education program.  Each week, students come to a 1-2 hour education session at the center.  These sessions happen daily whenever school is in progress.  There are many different education session program types, one for teens, elementary, etc.

I would like to generate a roster for each daily session and have the teacher come in and mark absent or present.  

Currently, I have custom objects in my Salesforce for participants and basically, we just have their demographic information.

I was thinking to create education session/tutoring session objects for each day and then pull up a roster for a type of tutoring session and then would be able to line edit on a daily basis.

I am just looking for some direction to explore here, any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

[willscarbrough]

We recently built an extensive attendance tracking system for afterschool in Salesforce.  Much of it might not translate if you want something simpler, but I would be happy to share ideas and lessons learned.  We track various stages of enrollment, cluster students into groups, and take attendance using customizations, some visualforce, and an offline .NET attendance taking app.

Feel free to contact me, will.scarbrough AT gmail

[Garry_Polmateer]

There are quite a few ways to go about this.

First question - do you have a set roster to start with?  i.e. Students X,Y, and Z are expected to be there every day, or do you add them dynamically based on who shows up.

If you're adding them dynamically, you could create a campaign for that particular class, and then add teh students as they come in.

If you're basing it off of a roster, I would say you could create a group called "After school program", add the normal students to teh group, and then create a sub object to track attendance for each particular day and then wrap some visualforce UI around it to make it more intuitive.

It probably wouldn't require a ton of custom dev/code, and could lean mostly on the Salesforce.com standard paradigm, but some Visualforce would probably make the data entry much easier during rollcall (and faster).  Could even be built to work on Mobile so the person in charge could take attendance with their iphone

Garry