Using courses for portfolios

[luke_caldwell]

 @travis_thurston ​

I heard that other institutions are using this option on their campuses ( @travis_thurston ​), has this been found to be embraced by students, career services, student development or not and the idea seems to be more adaptable/flexible than ePortfolios. I would appreciate any feedback on this issue. Thanks!

[kona]

On our campus we aren't using courses for student portfolios, but a few of our faculty have been using them with success both for personal portfolios and for program review.

[striglej]

We use courses for faculty portfolios.

A couple of benefits:

• Use rubrics to assess parts of the portfolio.
• We like to change user roles in the course at different points in the process.
• We create template courses to get them started and to give the reviewers a uniform look and feel so they know where to look for things.

The idea has really been embraced by the faculty.

The main reason that I could see to use courses for student portfolios, rather than the portfolio tool would be the rubric feature.

Of course, you could use this feature by have the student submit the link to their public e-portfolio into an assignment in another course and use a rubric there but it's an extra step and it depends how you want to track outcomes.

We did a presentation on this at our recent FL CanvasCon.  I'd be glad to send the ppt to anyone who is interested.

Josh

[travis_thurston · Accepted solution]

 @luke_caldwell 

Generally speaking our campus doesn't use courses for portfolios, but we have found a lot of success in using courses for our student teacher and administrator portfolios. This has worked well, because as we are teaching students to edit their portfolios we're also teaching them how to edit Canvas courses: Teaching Portfolio Video Tutorial (for student teachers at USU - TEAL) - YouTube​. In fact,  @kenneth_larsen ​ and I presented on this topic at InstructureCon 2014: Travis Thurston and Kenneth Larsen - Templatizing Courses and Leveraging the Magic of the Canvas API...

We have had a lot of positive feedback from our students who use the portfolios, and from the instructors who grade and manage the student portfolios. One other great feature that we added since last year was a Commenting tool which allows those grading to go in and make comments and suggested edits directly inline in the pages of the student portfolios. I'll include our initial video below, showing how graders could use the Commenting tool.

Let me know if you have any other questions. I'd be happy to share our experience.

~Travis

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[david_simmons]

I am in a great favor of ePortfolio. However, the ePortfolio is not publicly viewable, The students have to share the URL of their portfolio. Seems defeating its purpose of making it public?

[awilliams]

Having to share a URL even though a web page is public is just part of how the web works. Google has kind of made us forget about this fact, but it is still true. I think what you're looking for is a way to discover the student's ePortfolio from within Canvas. This could be done by having the students add a link to their ePortfolio to their profile. Check out How do I edit my Profile?​ for more information about that. Alternatively you could have students submit the link as an assignment submission.

[david_simmons]

Thank you so much Adam. A different way to navigate towards others' ePortfolio. (By sharing the URL)

Again thanks Adam!