A number of faculty use the Blackboard rubric tool to create rubrics, which they use to dynamically grade writing assignments, discussion board posts, etc., and which their students use as a frame work for understanding and meeting the criteria that the instructor follows in assessing and grading their performance on such work.
Since a rubric is normally used for an assessment, like a writing assignment or a weekly discussion board post, for which a student receives a single grade, it may seem that a single rubric cannot be used to grade assessments, such as blogs, wikis or journals, that students contribute to over an extended period of time, and which they receive grades for on, say, a weekly basis. However, Linda Ryder from the Distance and Online Learning office, created a rubric template, which she uses in her own courses, that you can readily adapt to use in situations where your students are receiving ongoing grades for their work on an assessment like a blog, journal or wiki.
To get this rubric template into your Blackboard course, do the following:
- Download the rubric (in the form of a .zip file) using the following link: Rubric Template.
- Import the rubric .zip file into the Rubrics area of your Blackboard course (Show me how to do that).
- Next, open the rubric in edit view (How to edit Rubrics).
When you view the rubric (see the following screenshot), you will see that it’s set up for a Blog that students post entries to each week, and which they receive a grade for each week. The rubric was changed so that, instead of the rows representing the individual criteria by which student work is graded in a rubric for a single-grade assessment, each row represents an individual week (in this case, Module 1, Module 2, etc.). The columns, in turn, represent on a descending scale from excellent to poor the levels of performance associated with the grades that students receive for their work for each week.
As students’ work is graded each week, Blackboard updates the amount of points that the students have earned, so that when they’ve completed work on the project, they will have earned whatever percentage of the final number of total possible points that their weekly grades add up to. Also, as student work is being graded using a rubric of this kind, students can navigate to their My Grades view to see their weekly grades and read the weekly comments that the instructor has provided for them as feedback. See the following screenshot:
The process of adapting the rubric template for your purposes is very straightforward. You can quickly change the amount of points that students can earn for each individual grade and the total amount of points that those individual grades add up to, as well as change the column performance-level descriptions to meet the type of assessment that you are using the rubric to grade. In addition, you can change the number of rows to match the grading schedule that you are following for that assessment. For example, the rubric template contains a row for each of 14 Modules, since the blog that the rubric is associated with represents a project that students would be working on over the course of 14 weeks. Were you to use the rubric for an assessment of shorter duration (perhaps for a final project that students work on for the last 10 weeks of the semester, or for work that they carry out in the context of an 8-week Sprint course), the number and names of the rows could be readily changed.
For more information about using rubrics in Blackboard to grade the type of work that you would use the rubric template for, read the tutorials that the following links point to:
- Associating Rubrics with Assessments
- Create a Rubric
- Delete a Rubric
- Grading Blogs using Rubrics
- Grading Journals using Rubrics
- Grading Wikis using Rubrics
In addition, and as always, please feel free to contact the Distance and Online Learning Office (629-7070 / DLHelp@hvcc.edu) if you have any questions about using Rubrics in Blackboard, or if you would like training on this subject.
Published: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 13:01:02 +0000 by m.petersen