Example of good practice in online assessment
Streamlining assignment marking with PDF stamps and rubrics
Dean Coldicott - School of Humanities and Social Sciences
This example demonstrates the use of mark-up tools and an online rubric as a means of streamlining the assignment marking process and providing good quality feedback.
About the unit
This example is from a postgraduate international relations unit on Global Governance. One of the main assessment items is a research essay that is submitted, marked and returned online via Desire2Learn, using Turnitin to screen the essay, Adobe Acrobat to mark up the essay and a rubric to provide clear and consistent feedback. Students and teaching staff have both indicated they appreciate the clear, consistent and legible feedback as well as the streamlining of the assessment process.
Marking the essay
Adobe Acrobat can be used to create a set of custom stamps for routine marking comments. In addition to these stamps, the highlight and comment tools allow for more specific and detailed feedback where relevant.
Once the essay has been marked up, the assignment can be uploaded to the dropbox ready to return once the rubric has been completed. This rubric makes use of the comments section to provide additional support via embedded links to resources for specific criteria.
Further information
The Rubrics guide provides step-by-step instructions for using rubrics in Desire2Learn.
For further discussion of online assessment methods, see Designing your online/blended unit in Desire2Learn: Assessment.
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| Completed rubric (click link to enlarge picture) |
Acrobat page marked up with stamps and comments (click link to enlarge picture) |
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Can you suggest another exemplar of online teaching at Deakin? Comments will be forwarded to Deakin Learning Futures.
