You-Attend · Brightspace
What changes when You-Attend can talk to Brightspace directly, and what you hand over to make it happen.
You-Attend runs on LTI, the standard every LMS implements. That is what lets it install in minutes and work the same way on Brightspace, Canvas and Moodle, and for most of what an attendance tool does, LTI is enough.
Brightspace also offers a direct API — Valence — and You-Attend uses it when an institution provides credentials for it. LTI tells You-Attend about the launch that is happening right now. The API lets it ask Brightspace questions about the course. Three things follow from that difference, and on a Brightspace site they are the difference between a tool that mostly works and one that simply works.
This page is Brightspace only. Canvas and Moodle have no equivalent and do not need one; the LTI services they implement cover the same ground.
Without the API, You-Attend builds its class list from the LTI membership service, which reports the students who have opened the course. That is how the standard is designed and it is a reasonable privacy position, but it means a new course fills in gradually: on the first day of term an instructor may see four names out of thirty, and the rest appear as students log in.
With the API, You-Attend reads the enrollment list. Every student is there the first time an instructor opens the grid, before anybody has logged in at all.
For an attendance tool this is the largest of the three differences. An instructor taking a register against an incomplete list has no way of knowing which names are missing, and the people most likely to be missing are the ones who have not engaged — which is exactly who attendance monitoring exists to find.
Brightspace attaches a gradebook column to a placement — a link added to course content. A launch from the You-Attend widget on the course homepage is not a placement, and Brightspace will not attach a grade item to one.
So without the API, a course reached only through the homepage widget records attendance and sends no grades. The fix is simple — add the Attendance Grid to the course from the Toolbox, which creates the column — but it is a step in every course, and a course where nobody does it keeps an empty gradebook column while attendance quietly accumulates.
With the API, You-Attend writes to the gradebook directly. The widget is enough; no per-course placement is needed for grades to flow.
Brightspace groups and sections are not carried by LTI at all. Without the API, You-Attend cannot see them.
With the API it can, which is what makes Manage meeting days by group/section possible in Course Settings. That matters for merged courses: where several sections are taught in one Brightspace course but meet on different days, each group gets its own meeting days, and attendance and grades are calculated against the days that group actually meets rather than the union of all of them.
An institution that merges sections into a single course shell generally needs this. One that runs a course shell per section generally does not.
Worth being clear about the boundary, because the API is not a license upgrade and does not unlock features:
The API changes where three pieces of information come from. It does not change what You-Attend does with them.
Two values, created by a Brightspace administrator and sent to You-Attend:
There is nothing to install and no change to how instructors or students use You-Attend. Existing courses pick it up the next time they are opened — class lists complete themselves, and grades from widget launches start flowing without anybody adding anything to a course.
The App Key is a credential and should be handled like one, which is why the first step is to talk to us rather than to send it. Tell us if it is ever rotated: a key that no longer matches stops the API working while LTI carries on, which looks exactly like the behavior described above rather than like an error.
| What you see | What it usually is |
|---|---|
| Class lists are still incomplete after the API was connected | The credentials are not reaching us, or were rotated in Brightspace. The symptom is identical to having no API at all, because You-Attend falls back to the LTI membership service when the API cannot be used. |
| Grades still do not reach the gradebook | Check the course has an attendance gradebook column, and that Create Gradebook Entry is on in Course Settings. The API removes the need for a placement, not the need for the setting. |
| Manage meeting days by group/section does nothing | Groups are read from Brightspace, so the course must actually have group categories set up there. |
| Attendance works but the API features do not | Expected, and the right way round: LTI carries attendance, so a broken API connection degrades the class list and grade routing without ever stopping the register. |