ePortfolio Grading Rubrics

The rubrics were designed to be used to assess ePortfolio work at the undergraduate course level. The rubrics were intentionally made to not be subject specific so that they can be used in multiple disciplines. You will notice in a few of the rubrics that there are highlighted spaces where you can add course specific content in order to customize the rubric to your course assignment.

These rubrics were not designed to be assessment-ready. The intention of the rubrics is to be used as building blocks that an instructor can create their own rubric out of. You can select the criteria from the rubrics and modify them to create a rubric customized for your course ePortfolio assignment.

There are five different rubrics. Each rubric is a common ePortfolio assessment “Category”: Content, Organization, Professionalism, Reflective Thinking, and Creative Thinking. Rather than making a huge rubric, we decided to make smaller rubrics organized by different themes that are commonly used when assessing ePortfolios. The idea is that an instructor could pull a few elements from each rubric that are relevant to their ePortfolio assignment to build their own rubric tailored to their course assignment expectations.

The rubrics were created by the Carleton University ePortfolio Faculty Learning community. Thank you to Allie Davidson, Jen Gilbert, Peggy Hartwick, Beth Hughes, Eva Kartchava, Rachelle Thibodeau, Samah Sabra, and Sarah Todd for their contributions to this project.

The structure and content of the rubrics was drawn from existing resources, ePortfolio research, and instructors’ personal insights from using ePortfolios in their courses. One of our main sources of inspiration were the AAC&U Value Rubrics. To see a complete list of our references, check out the last page of the rubrics document.

During the first year that cuPortfolio (Carleton’s ePortfolio system) was being piloted at Carleton, one of the biggest challenges that instructors faced was the question of how to evaluate the work students produced. Because ePortfolios enable students to demonstrate their learning and mastery of using unique, multimodal artifacts, the instructors found it difficult to reliably assess the variety of unique expressions of learning found in their students’ portfolios.

Although there are ePortfolio evaluation resources available online, the instructors found these difficult to apply in their own contexts. This is because available rubrics were either designed for program level portfolios, included too much course-specific content, or were not open access. In response, our ePortfolio Faculty Learning community drafted these rubrics.

No, these rubrics are an open education resource (OER) with an Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) licence.

Check out the TLS Assessment Resource on rubrics.