A system and method for assessing a student's performance in a course in an online course environment, the method comprising creating rubrics that correlate with course materials for an online course, the rubrics including a scoring schema which is stored in an educational management system, distributing the rubrics from the educational system to a user's computer through a network connection, displaying the rubrics on the user's computer together with their correlating course materials, recording the outcome of a student's performance on the rubrics, the outcome including a grade associated with a student, and transferring the recorded outcome to the educational management system.