A few months back I helped Credential Engine extend the Credential Transparency Description Language (CTDL) to cover Rubrics. They are have now published the first batch of rubrics in the Credential Finder for viewing on the web and as linked data.
Rubrics are or course useful when marking assessments, but transparency of rubrics is important in describing educational attainment because if you don’t know what criteria were used in assessing a skill then you don’t know whether an assertion of some level of proficiency in that skill is sufficient for the task you have in mind. This matters to anyone learning (or thinking of learning) a new skill, or applying for a job, and to employers looking to hire someone.
From early last year Credential Engine ran a task group for Rubrics which, as task groups do for any major update to CTDL, looked at use cases, existing practice, data models(*) and how they all related to what was already in CTDL before proposing new terms for the description of rubrics. (* Incidentally, as part of this Stuart Sutton used the Data Ecosystem Schema Mapping tool (DESM) to create a mapping of existing Rubric standards, available from the Credential Engine DESM page, select Rubrics). The outcome was the ability to describe in detail rubrics, the criteria they use and the levels expected against those criteria. You can also relate rubrics (and their criteria) to credentials, assessments, learning opportunities, tasks, jobs, occupations and industries, and provide information about who created the rubric and what for. This is described in the relevant section of the CTDL Handbooks.
And now there are the first 25 rubrics in the registry. You can access them through the Credential Finder, which as well as having the descriptive information for the rubrics as a whole has all the details of the criteria used. I hope this will aid discovery and reuse of the best rubrics, and that the availability as linked data (warning, raw JSON-LD file for applications and coders) will bring clarity to assertions made in credentials and job requirements. In future maybe learning outcome descriptions, credentials and job adverts will be able to be more precise about what is meant by “ability to weave baskets”.