Education/Projects/JetpackForLearning/Profiles/Rubrick

Project site: Rubrick

Code Repo: Rubrick

Purpose and goals Creating online work as part of university courses enjoys growing popularity and enthusiasm. University of Mary Washington, CUNY and Penn State have the richest environments for web publishing as part of the academic experience. Yet, the tools existing to assess online work continue to rely on 20th century technologies of email, word processors, and even paper.

Drawing inspiration from Zotero, Rubrick aims to address that gap by providing an in-browser mechanism for assessing online work. While at first glance it seems like a tool to ease and simplify faculty work -- and it is -- it more fundamentally improves student learning in the following ways:

1. Rubrick allows evaluation rubrics to be shared and reused, and so facilitates normalizing of rubric evaluations. So, for example, a teacher will be able to allow all students to use the same rubric to assess example work, and discuss the results in class. This lets the teacher and students get on the same page about what the rubric evaluates and how.

2. Rubrick encourages sharing of evaluation rubrics. Online student work is still new territory for educators, and it does not have the old familiar standards of evaluation that the tradition X-page paper has. We need to widely share how we evaluate students' online work so that we can grow pedagogically and bring that growth into the classroom to improve students' use of the web for academic purposes. Making rubrics we use public will foster that growth.

3. Rubrick makes no effort to distinguish roles by student or teacher. Any student can create their own rubrics and share them with teachers and classmates just as the teacher can. This begins the process of peer evaluation, and begins the process of student reflection on how they evaluate their own work and the work of their peers.

More discussion is developing at the Rubrick project site