A few weeks back I linked to the Mozilla Foundation’s JetPack for Learning Design Challenge, and suggested that it might be good fun to assemble a team from the community of ProfHacker readers. Regular writers Jeff McClurken and Alex Jarvis, guest author Heather Whitney, and generally awesome people Thomas Brown, Mike Garcia, and Patrick Murrayjohn banded together to develop a proposal around the browser-based assessment of online work, which for now we’ve code-named Rübrick.
As we see it, Rübrick will have the following features:
- Grade right from your browser–no more switching apps, or even switching tabs
- Builds on familiar technology such as Google Docs, so should be robust and lightweight
- Fully customizable
- Cloud-based storage, so you can grade anywhere you can see the internet.
- Will make both faculty grading and peer- or self-assessment more structured, efficient, and easier to explain.
We’ve got mockups, plus a proof-of-concept screencast that shows it should be possible to build such a thing without too much sweating. The main goal in the next phase of the project would be making the interface simple and the entire thing stable.
What would you like to see in a browser-based assessment tool? Let us know in comments.
12 Comments
This would be tremendously useful. Even though I use a rubric now, I must spend 25% of my grading time flipping between windows, downloading things, uploading back to students, formatting, etc…
Tablet pen interface. There just should be a way to do it.
I like this a lot! I’d encourage, if possible, the flexibility of letting folks split screens either direction, though. There are some things it would be easier to grade with a vertical split.
Is it possible to grade .doc type things using something like this? Via an interface with google docs, I presume?
We would like to make word processing files gradable with this tool also, yes indeed.
And I believe we’re going to have as many things customizable as possible, that are consistent with it being totally simple for us to develop and everyone to use.
This would be wonderful! I hope you develop it!
Love the concept!
<3 this something awful.
As an educator striving to integrate 21st century approaches to my teaching practices, I think this idea is Genius! The more streamlined my classroom practices can be, the better! An in browser rubric would also allow students to check the progress of their own work. Love it…please create this!
Can you make it work with assignments submitted via a VLE, and Turnitin (usually as .doc)?
this would be great for our instructors! I’d love to see how something like this would work with an LMS
This is an amazing, much-needed undertaking. The Google Docs integration is especially intriguing. If there’s anything I can do to help (beta test, rubric design, etc.), I’d be happy to contribute.
I wonder, with cloud-based storage of academic records – would there be a potential FERPA issue? Otherwise, really useful!
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Todd McCann, ProfHacker. ProfHacker said: New at ProfHacker: @jbj introduces Rubrick, a proposed Mozilla #jetpack plugin for browser-based grading/assessment: http://bit.ly/64yRiI [...]
[...] is a quick follow-up to last week’s post about Rübrick, the Firefox plug-in for assessing or grading online work that a few of us are developing for [...]
[...] Jetpacks. ProfHacker covered the announcement, and subsequently formed a team to build Rubrick, a browser-based way to quickly build, share, and use rubrics for grading online projects. (See an [...]