  Attendance rate is an important indicator of students' study motivation,
behavior and Psychological status; However, the heterogeneous nature of student
attendance rates due to the course registration difference or the
online/offline difference in a blended learning environment makes it
challenging to compare attendance rates. In this paper, we propose a novel
method called Relative Attendance Index (RAI) to measure attendance rates,
which reflects students' efforts on attending courses. While traditional
attendance focuses on the record of a single person or course, relative
attendance emphasizes peer attendance information of relevant individuals or
courses, making the comparisons of attendance more justified. Experimental
results on real-life data show that RAI can indeed better reflect student
engagement.
