Random Attendees

Overview

Teachers at the University of Amsterdam use Canvas LMS as their online learning platform. It includes an attendance registration table. During tutorials, it would be useful to be able to randomly permute the rows of students who have registered their attendance and remove the rows of absent students. This is just a modification of the HTML and does not involve any communication with other systems and hence does not pose any privacy concerns. A random permutation allows teachers to select students to present their work to the class in a fair way, since reading from the top of the list, each student is equally likely to be selected. Since there is not enough time during tutorials for each student to be tested, this is the next best option. This extension makes the random permutation of attendees easy since it just adds a button to the HTML which, on click, removes absent student from the displayed table and randomly permutes the others. The script only does a local modification of the HTML and does not store or communicate any data to external services.