Online Portfolio Assessment
for
Technical Writing Programs

Criteria (Course Objectives) for Technical Communication Courses

It is our theory that, in a digital and multicultural world, traditional forms of communication should be augmented with visual and hypertext elements. Communication is a connection between people, a sharing of knowledge that occurs across boundaries of culture, language and space. To make this connection, we need to use all of the tools that we have - not just writing, but graphics, presentation, and positioning (can the reader find the text?). These skills require complex formatting of documents, creation of visual narratives and web work. For this new way of writing we created new criteria, or rubric, with which to assess the results.

The creation of the new construct for teaching technical communication was a group endeavor. After an initial discussion with the instructors and members of the STC (Society for Technical Communication), we arrived at a common core of teaching modules. Then, in a group discussion that began in formal emails and ended in a recorded meeting, the professors who taught technical communication formally agreed on the criteria to use in the assessment. The final criterion on this list – that regarding textual attribution – was optional during the scoring process because we were unable to reach consensus about the preferred method for textual attribution (MLA, APA, Chicago, or IEEE).