Core Module 2 · Digital Communication Instruction Certificate
Designing and Assessing Digital Projects
This module covers what makes a digital project worth assigning and worth assessing with care. You will build an assessment framework that gives room for creative work while holding students to disciplinary standards, and you will practice feedback suited to multimodal projects. Plan on 4 to 6 hours over two weeks: about 2 hours on the activities, the rest reading.
What this module asks you to do
- Write an assessment framework for a digital project with separate descriptors for rhetoric, content, technical execution, and reflection. (Activity 1)
- Anticipate the three most likely failure modes for the project type. (Activity 1, prompt 6)
- Evaluate two sample projects with your framework. (Activity 2)
- Revise the framework from what the evaluation showed. (Activity 2, prompt 3)
- Design a digital project assignment with weighted criteria. (Assignment builder)
- Assign the project in a course and report what students produced. (your commitment, and a short follow-up from CWSP near the end of the term)
Why Digital Project Assessment Breaks Down
Faculty often assign a podcast, a website, an infographic, or a data visualization with real enthusiasm. Then thirty submissions arrive. How do you evaluate them fairly? What counts as excellent? Are you grading the argument or the production value?
These questions trace back to the assignment. When a digital project leaves its purpose vague, its audience unnamed, its criteria generic, or its production requirements unclear, students fill the gap with what they control, which is usually how the project looks. The work comes in polished and thin on disciplinary substance. Rubrics built for it end up rewarding design fluency over critical thinking.
Three assessment traps come up often:
Visual design gets too much weight because it is the easiest dimension to see. Polish of this kind tends to reflect a student's access to design tools and prior training more than disciplinary competence.
The rubric lists so many discrete criteria that the project's overall rhetorical effect drops out of view. Students who meet each requirement without thinking about purpose or audience still score well.
Students write a reflection, but it carries so little weight (or gets so little attention from the instructor) that they learn to treat it as a box to check. The best evidence of their rhetorical learning disappears.
No rubric repairs an under-designed project. Fix the assignment first. Specify the rhetorical purpose, the audience, and how the project's modes should carry its argument.
Assessment Frameworks That Fit Multimodal Work
A good assessment framework for a digital project does four things. It makes rhetorical effectiveness the primary criterion. It assesses content and argument apart from technical execution, while recognizing how the two connect. It gives the reflection enough weight to count. And it describes quality in terms of what excellent work looks like, so students see a target in place of a catalog of failures.
The four dimensions carry different weights:
Rhetorical Effectiveness
Did the project accomplish its stated purpose for its stated audience? Does it make clear claims suited to the discipline? Does it choose its modes to support those claims? Give this dimension the most weight.
Disciplinary Content
Is the information correct, properly sourced, and pitched at the right level for the audience? Does the project show that the student understands the course content in depth?
Technical Execution
Is the product functional and accessible? Do the design choices support what the project communicates? Technical polish should never outweigh rhetorical and intellectual quality.
Reflective Component
Does the reflection show that the student made rhetorical choices on purpose and explains why? Read it before the project. The reflection changes how you read the product.
For each dimension, write the "excellent" descriptor first, then work downward. A rubric written from "poor" upward tends to fill with descriptions of failure. Starting from the top gives students a picture of the work you hope to see.
Several feedback methods suit digital projects. In a screencast, you record yourself moving through the project while you comment aloud. It works well for websites and data visualizations because you point to specific choices as you talk. Recorded audio feedback is efficient, and many students engage with it more closely than with written comments. In either mode, name each pattern once and move on.
Every digital project you design takes a position on AI tools, whether you state it or not. An assignment silent on AI leaves each student to settle the question alone. Students settle it in different ways. Their work comes out uneven, and the outcomes inequitable. Whatever you decide about permitting AI, state your reasons and make sure your assessment criteria match them. Module 3 of this certificate gives you a framework for reaching that decision on principled grounds and writing it into the assignment. For now, carry one question into the activity: where do AI tools enter this project, and does your assessment framework account for them?
Build an Assessment Framework for a Digital Project
Choose a digital project you would assign in one of your courses. Build an assessment framework that evaluates rhetorical effectiveness, disciplinary content, technical execution, and the reflective component as distinct but related dimensions. Then name the three ways students are most likely to go wrong, and check that your criteria address each one.
What is the project, and what does excellent rhetorical work look like?
What a complete response does
- Describes the format, audience, and disciplinary context.
- Writes the excellent descriptor first for each dimension.
- Weights technical polish below rhetorical effectiveness and content.
- Names three failure modes and the criterion addressing each.
Prompts marked * need at least one full sentence each to submit the module.
Disciplinary content and technical execution
Reflection criteria and where students most often struggle
Contribute to the Repository
Share your assessment framework to build a cross-disciplinary library of digital project rubrics for future cohorts.
Evaluate Sample Student Digital Projects
Test your framework on student work. Open the two sample infographics (opens in a new window), both written to the same prompt. Evaluate each with your Activity 1 framework. Then write a short feedback memo to the student who produced it.
Each memo (150–200 words) should open by naming the project's clearest rhetorical strength. Next, identify the one revision that would most improve its rhetorical effectiveness. Leave visual design aside here. Close with one specific suggestion the student will be able to act on before resubmitting.
What a complete response does
- Applies each framework dimension to both projects.
- Sets appearance aside in judging the weaker project.
- Names one revision to the framework.
Prompts marked * need at least one full sentence each to submit the module.
Contribute to the Repository
Share your evaluation practice to help future cohorts calibrate digital project assessment.
Build a Digital Project Assignment with Assessment Framework
Use your work from Activities 1 and 2 to design a complete digital project assignment for your course, with the task prompt and your assessment framework. Fill in the fields below, then click Preview to generate a formatted assignment document ready to print.
What a complete response does
- States the task, audience, purpose, format, scope, reflection, and due dates in the prompt.
- Gives separate criteria for each dimension.
- States the weight of the reflection and the reason for it.
Prompts marked * need at least one full sentence each to submit the module.
Module 2 Readings
- ·Leahy, Anna. "Rubrics Save Time and Make Grading Criteria Visible." In Bad Ideas About Writing. WVU Libraries (open access). Read in the digital project context: the critique of rubrics as mechanizing response is even more acute for multimodal work.
- ·CWSP Formative Criteria Sheet (opens in a new window). A model of holistic criteria-based assessment, directly applicable to digital project design.
- ·CWSP Response Style Overview (opens in a new window). Descriptive and reader-based response styles suit comments on modal choices in digital projects.
- ·Gogan, Brian, Lisa Singleterry, Susan Caulfield, and Moline Mallamo. "Writing Assignment Prompts Across the Curriculum: Using the DAPOE Framework for Improved Teaching and Aggregable Research." The WAC Journal 33 (2022). DAPOE names five parts of an assignment prompt: directions, audience, purpose, objectives, and evaluation. A prompt that leaves one of them unstated produces predictable assessment problems in digital projects.
- ·Sample Assignment with Evaluation Guide (opens in a new window). The chocolate and Nobel Prize assignment with its rubric, a concrete model of how assignment design, criteria development, and formative feedback work together in a creative project.
- ·Responding to Student Projects Orally (opens in a new window). Audio feedback strategies well-suited to digital project response.
Where you will use this work
Near the end of that term, CWSP will email you one question about what students produced. Your answer completes the last objective.
Four questions about this module
Your answers here go to CWSP without your name or email, apart from your module responses. CWSP reads them to revise the module. They are optional, and they send when you submit.
Submit Module 2
Submitting saves your work to the C²TC program and sends a copy to Kirsti Cole at CWSP and to your NC State email. Your assessment framework from this module carries forward into Module 3 and the certificate capstone.