Crowdmark vs RubiStar

Crowdmark is a web application for evaluating, discussing and responding to exams, essays, lab reports and other student work. Instructors can use paper assessments they already have, create assignments or set up exams with multiple-choice questions. They can scan and upload student work, while students can submit assignments using mobile phones. Grading tools support scores, graphical annotations, hypertext comments, mathematical notation and reusable comments. Crowdmark reports student performance by question and provides an API for extracting insights. Its FAQ lists roster and grade synchronization with Canvas, Brightspace/D2L, Moodle, Blackboard and Sakai. The Canvas connection can import courses, rosters, team members and sections, and export grades. The service serves higher education and K–12, with licensing options for instructors, departments, enterprises, schools and school districts. Prices are quoted by Crowdmark, and both course-based and annual subscriptions are listed. Crowdmark says personal information may be processed and stored outside Canada, including in the United States.

RubiStar is a free web tool for teachers creating rubrics for project-based learning activities. It offers generic templates for common projects and research assignments that can be printed or adapted. Template subjects include oral projects, products, multimedia, science, research and writing, work skills, math, art, music and reading. Selecting a category fills in suggested quality ratings, and teachers can change almost all of the suggested rubric text. The tutorial covers making a printable rubric without saving, creating and editing a saved rubric, and analyzing a saved rubric. Users can search rubric titles, author names or author email addresses with up to three keywords. The editor offers a permanent option for keeping a rubric online for more than one week. Registration requests a title, first initial, last name, ZIP code, password and email address; international users are instructed to enter ZIP code 99999. The site provides a RubiStar en Español link. Its terms describe the tool as educational and say rubrics may be removed if they are personal or commercial. The terms also say administrators cannot guarantee recovery or accurate compilation of data lost or misrepresented after a system error.