Hi Kim
We are just in the process of quitting a third party e-portfolio integration, and whilst native Canvas eportfolios (not sure if this is the same as Portfolium mentioned by Chris) has moved forwards, rather like Canvas Group areas it remains a tricky 'look and feel' for staff and students.
The key advantage of the native Canvas e-portfolios is that it is possible for students to share the portfolio publicly, or to selected external email addresses; there are use cases for this in areas such as nursing and vocational education. Generally this is specifically seen as the advantage of third party integrations, in allowing students to share or 'take their portfolio with them' when they leave (lifelong learning).
Importantly I believe students can nominate/link work that they have already submitted to a course/assignment without reloading it
I have looked at and prototyped the use of Canvas Mastery Outcomes/Standards for 'portfolio style' work; It is possible to define a set of outcomes at account or sub-account levels which reflect your individual portfolio requirements, and which can be deployed in specific courses against specific formative or summative assessments as part of grading rubrics (with or without marks assigned).
- The key advantage is that Mastery (not Mastery Paths) is able to collate evidence/progress across a range of community and course sites, and over several terms or years.
- The key disadvantage is that there is a certain clunkiness in handling outcomes at scale, and our prototype version involved creating template rubrics with the all requirements listed, on the basis that it is easier for teachers to delete rubric outcomes rather than find and add rubric outcomes
Students and staff can then see progress bars within the Mastery Dashboard, and links to the work that was submitted.
As each item is submitted it is also linked to an account level time stamped transaction log
As with all student work, they automatically get a copy of submitted work in their personal Canvas 'submissions' folder - from memory they should also be able to link these across into the portfolio without any use of Mastery Outcomes.
In short, Mastery functions as both a way of tracking overall outcomes, and a way of "tagging" submitted content against requirements/outcomes. Generally I see this offering a potentially improved way forwards for LMSs that would minimise secondary uploading by students of existing work.
We have found that a key challenge for vocational and competency based courses (usually with portfolio type requirements) is that we have awarding body requirements which are parallel to, rather than integrated with our academic degree requirements. Thus our Student Information System was tracking the Degree requirements and credits, but not the requirements for the student to be able to claim awarding body status (eg Engineering, Audiology) which were being dealt with offline.
- Our solution has been to build 'Zero Credit' courses in the SIS for tracking purposes. This resolves the issue of i) generating the Canvas courses at the right time, ii) adding the student enrolments at the right time and iii) generating summative assignments at the right time. iv) tracking and reporting completion. Students get a new tracking course in each year of enrolment, but these are crosslisted to create the illusion of a single course over time.
I would love to be able to deploy a specific overall portfolio structure to specific student groups within native Canvas porfolio, but unless it can be done by importing a predetermined file structure (done by individual student or by API) I'm not sure whether that is possible.
- It is possible to build RCE content in an attractive way, then copy the html content as preformatted text, and teach students how to paste that into html view, and then populate content
- For shorter portfolio style exercises Canvas Discussions have some affordances, and if it needs to be private, then it can be set as an activity for groups of one
- Also 'Build upon' quizzes looked promising as a private portfolio type build, but whilst existing student submissions are rolled forwards, instructor feedback/grading isn't, and seems submission point specific
