I. Introduction

My project explored problems of online assessment and the uses of portfolio assessment and rubrics as solutions.

The purpose of this project was to design an e-portfolio for the assessment of students in an online community college-level creative writing course. The project shows the necessary relationship between portfolios and rubrics. The online learning environment has different assessment needs than the face-to-face learning environment. One of the questions that faculty and administrators have brought up as a problem with online learning is assessment. How do we know who is taking an online test? How do we manage the security of assessment? Should we even attempt to transfer the classroom face-to-face assessment experience to the online classroom? I believe that the solution is to build assessment itself into the course. My project explored problems of online assessment and the uses of portfolio assessment and rubrics as solutions. In my project, rubrics and portfolios work together to create authentic assessment in online learning. A secondary goal of my project was to develop techniques in portfolio assessment that will be useful in all disciplines.

The course I developed is a creative writing course. The course is meant to be offered to intermediate creative writing students at the community college level. Although the course is designed to allow for the greatest possible range of creativity, the structure of the course (in the form of assessment and critique rubrics) encourages feedback and community. It contains very detailed and structured rubrics for peer critiques that are applied to the portfolio assessment component. As part of my ongoing course development, I have examined portfolio assessments used by other classes.

This paper uses the words “portfolio” and “e-portfolio” interchangeably. Even though there are great differences in the creation and maintenance of the two, they share some essential pedagogical concerns. An e-portfolio is a collection of student work in the form of electronic media (MS Word files, graphics, audio files, video, etc.) that resides on a computer disk or as a website. An “artifact” is any item or document that goes into the e-portfolio.