I know rubrics are quite popular for writing assignments. Warnock supports with with his several subtle reassurances that rubrics are easy to move to the online space. I have tried different forms of traditional rubrics but I have not found them helpful to me as a grader. I also don’t find them helpful to students as writers, when students write to rubrics as opposed to identifying a purpose and writing to that.

All that said, I am interested in a different kind of rubric. Maybe a rubric that I wouldn’t necessarily call a rubric. But then, I don’t really know what that looks like. One of my biggest forms of feedback to the entire class through alternating student papers. I have students all look at one or two paragraphs from the same draft and offer one piece of feedback for each paragraph. Using track changes, I go through and comment or cut, paste, add, delete those suggestions on the screen. This gives them elements to think about in their own drafts. Using discussion board followed by some sort of screen capture technology, I think this could be recreated in the online classroom.

Since we go through 4-5 drafts of the paper, I am only committing fully commenting on the next to last draft. We look at one to two paragraphs as a class and then they are tasked with assessing and coming up with a plan for their own revision based on peer responses and much of what their peers are saying comes from the modeling from the different student papers as a class. For me, this is an effective way of managing the amount of grading and feedback in face-to-face classes and would just be one piece of managing it in the online classroom.

Another thing I have really liked in the online classroom was group papers because I could give continuous feedback as they worked because I was only responding to 8-9 papers. This allowed the amount of feedback to go up while keeping it manageable and teaching a group of students individually.