The use of rubrics to assess distance education courses in a Brazilian university

Resumo

Distance education, mediated by Information and Communication Technologies, is increasingly present in the Brazilian educational scenario due to legislation incentives. In this modality, assessment to ensure effective learning, taking into account the particularities of distance education, represents a challenge to education managers. The present research investigates the competences developed in two courses entirely lectured at distance in the Information Management degree of the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR). For this purpose, bibliographic and documental methodology was used in order to construct two assessment rubrics in the platform Corubric, which may also be used as an instrument for research data collection. The results were analyzed using descriptive statistics techniques, non-parametric Kruskal-Wallis H test, and Pearson’s correlation and multiple regression tests. The competences that were developed by the students and those that need improvement were discussed, as well as the topics that were more related to learning and how much they affected the results. It was concluded that the rubrics built from Corubric are instruments capable of generating information that may assist decision-making in the education field.