Rubric building as a class activity

Last year at a conference, I presented my rubric building tool named RubricStudio (now iRubric). One of the attendees mentioned how she used rubric building as an activity in her 5th grade class. I liked the idea, but never found an opportunity to try it in my class. Until...

I gave an assignment on evaluating web hosting services in my e-commerce course. It was supposed to be a slam-dunk assignment: name three criteria that you find important when looking for a web hosting service. Most students assumed criteria such as "cost" were too obvious, so almost 50% missed that as a top criteria. By the way, cost is almost always the top factor or the business is not doing good business.

So after the assignment was graded, I tried to go over different criteria for choosing a web host and we all got confused. And then I thought of doing a rubric with the class.

So I went to my creation, RubricStudio (now iRubric.com) and started a simple rubric. It was like turning on a switch at 9:00 PM. A class that is usually hard to keep awake at this time of the day is more lively than ever. We all worked on the rubric together. I saved it and sent a copy to the class, and the rest is history. We ran out of time and never finished the rubric. It just got too large. But it was nevertheless a great learning exercise. While building the rubric, we all discussed the criteria and how we were going to evaluate hosting services. I found rubric building to be a great class activity. Give it a try... You'll be amazed.

BTW, the rubric is at http://www.rcampus.com/rubricshowc.cfm?code=YB695&sp=yes. As I mentioned, we just had enough time to draft the the criteria and categories. So I left it as that for them to complete on their own.