[ARCHIVED] Access to Portfolios

[ingrid_abraham]

Hello,

Some of our learners have created portfolios, made them 'public' and shared the urls so that they can be accessed by tutors and our quality assurance team.

However, it is possible for learners to gain access to other learners' portfolios by a process of trial and error if they change and experiment with the last two digits of the url. Obviously, we would hope that learners would not do this but it represents a potential security breach.

Is there a way around this? If learners make their portfolios 'private' is there a way to give access to authorised users such as their tutors while eliminating the risk of others gaining access without permission?

[kblack · Accepted solution]

Hi  @ingrid_abraham  - I work at an institution where the faculty post private ePortfolios for contract renewal. While reviewing the documentation, you probably were as confused as I was about the true difference between a public and private ePortfolio, since sharing the link either way apparently allows one access to it.  For the record, here are the appropriate documentation pages for students:

How do I make my ePortfolio public as a student? 

https://community.canvaslms.com/docs/DOC-10490-4212717399 

Your experience verified for me that indeed keeping it private is best.  For one thing, the URL is much longer and is less likely to be discovered "accidentally," as you have discovered.  It also will not be retrieved on sites such as Google, based on some experiments that we conducted at our own institution. I would recommend that you indeed have the students make it private.  The only thing you will have to worry about then is that the students copy/paste the URL accurately!

[ingrid_abraham]

Thank you  @kblack .

I think the fact that the url has to be shared in both cases did confuse me, but I can see the difference in the urls now.

I will make sure that all of our learners' portfolios are set to private.