Running an activity and taking attendance
Set an activity up, enrol people, mark the register session by session, and print a sheet for the room.
An activity is where your programme meets the people it is for. Setting one up and recording who came is the most frequent thing most teams do in CommonLynk.
The five steps
- Choose the type of activity. Pick a tile such as training, distribution or awareness session. This one choice also decides how the activity will be counted, so it matters more than it looks.
- Activity details. The name, description, venue and facilitator, then the project it belongs to, its dates and times, how many attendance sessions it needs, the maximum number of participants and the hours per day.
- Lynk participants. Add the people taking part, either by searching for them one at a time or by uploading a list matched on national ID number.
- Lynk evaluation forms. Decide whether the activity is evaluated: a satisfaction score, a test before and after, both or neither.
- Review the sessions. Check the attendance sessions that were generated, rename them, and add or remove one.
A summary screen then shows everything before you confirm and create the activity.
Sessions
A session is one occasion within an activity. A single day of distribution has one session; a training course running over five days has five. CommonLynk works out how many you need from the dates you gave, and step five lets you adjust that and give each session a name of your own.
Sessions become the columns of your attendance grid and the columns of the sheet you print.
The attendance grid
Open an activity and choose Attendance. The grid has one row per participant and one column per session. The first three columns show the person, their ID number and their gender so you can find the right row quickly.
Each cell offers four choices: Present, Absent, Excused and Late. Cells change colour as you set them, so an unfinished column is easy to spot.
- Buttons above the grid set every cell at once to present or to absent, or reset the whole grid.
- Each session heading has its own button that fills only that column, which is the quick way to mark one day.
Scores before and after
If you switched testing on in step four, two more columns appear at the end of the grid for a score before the activity and a score after it. You can also draw those scores from a form your participants fill in instead of typing them.
Once people have both scores, a scoring page works out how much each person gained, both as a plain difference and as a proportion of what they could have gained, and gives you a group average. Where a figure cannot be worked out it is left blank rather than shown as zero.
Printing a sheet
Choose "Print Attendance Sheet" and you can build the paper register you take into the room. Row number and full name are always on it; you choose whether to include date of birth, gender, nationality, phone, national ID, a signature box and a notes column.
- Choose a range of sessions to print, up to ten on one sheet.
- Add up to twenty blank rows for people who arrive on the day without being enrolled.
- Preview shows the first few participants against the columns you chose before you download.