Google began rolling out a new attendance report feature on Monday the 5th of October for its G-Suite customers in Enterprise for Education. However, the next day, the company put the rollout on hold for performance evaluation.
Attendance reports offer the host of a conversation a useful insight into the meeting at the end of a Google Meet session. These reports include participant email addresses, names, and the length of time spend in the call. The report shows the duration of each person’s attendance, and even whether they were removed from the call. Dial-in students also count in these reports.
To access attendance reports, meetings must have a minimum of 5 people, and a maximum of 250. Students with the ability to create meetings can also get attendance reports too.
Falling Behind the Class
Google has been struggling to stay at the same level ass its competitors in the UC environment, namely Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom – at least for the enterprise market. However, education is an area where Google excels. ZK Research founder, Zeus Kerravala, says that education is the one vertical in cloud collaboration that Google competes well in.
Kerravala says that Google has the advantage of being a cloud-based product for collaboration that syncs with Chromebooks – an affordable and convenient tool for schools and students. Google’s announcement comes at a time. Google’s announcement come at a time when educational facilities are working and teaching from home.
Right now, a lot of educators could benefit from a Meet Attendance Report feature. Teachers are using add-ons for Google Chrome in place of the official option. Yet countless Google competitors already have a similar function.
Right now, it’s unsure how long the Attendance feature for Google Meet will be on hold for.
Keeping Up with the Competition
Zoom has a feature available that tracks how long participants were in a call. This also tracks an aggregate times students were in calls; however it takes about 30 minutes for reports to show up.
Microsoft Teams also introduced attendance features in April. This function asks hosts to actually take attendance before the meeting ends, however. The functionality to download participant reports is in development, according to the Microsoft roadmap.
Cisco announced attendance functionality as part of the Webex Classrooms solution earlier in 2020. The Webex attendance solution will have the same features as Google Meet, but it won’t come out until November.
Google announced this week that Meet will continue to be free for everyone through to March 31st, 2021. This functionality was scheduled to run out at the end of September. The scheduled end of the solution got a push back thanks to the upcoming holiday.
