Feedback Discussion • Portfolio Usability and Workflows

[Dalma_Schnell]

As you use the Portfolio EAP, please use this space to share your feedback/comments around the usability of the features and workflows. 

[jsowalsk]

Hi @Dalma_Schnell,

• Would you be able to provide a testing environment that has demo courses, evidence, achievements, and skills that we can test with for the tool?  Since this instance refreshes each week we want to see what your team is expecting us to do and see which can help if you provide examples.
• Is there a test plan we can go by? At first, we cannot tell the difference between Evidence and Showcase portfolios since they look similar.
• We do not have the ability to add skills and tags. What exactly do the tags do? What is their purpose? 
• Students can create their own portfolio but they are not able to delete it, if they wanted to. Is this intended?
• For the evaluation portfolio, what is the intended group? Can a portfolio evaluation be created from across a number of courses? Or just associated with a single course?
• What are the current visibility and sharing options? Can these be customized, such as shared publicly? Such as sharing this information after graduation.
• In the future, will there be personalization options such in addition to the cover image such as a profile picture much like LinkedIn has?

Jessica

[Dalma_Schnell]

Hi @jsowalsk,

Thanks so much for these thoughtful questions, they're exactly the kind of insights that help us improve the Portfolio experience.

To get a better sense of how Portfolios work, I recommend starting with the overview video in the Canvas Community user group right hand side bar. Even though the section is labeled "coming soon," the video is already available and gives a great walkthrough of how Showcase and Evaluation Portfolios function.

We’ve also launched two test guides in the Community to help you structure your testing:

1. Evaluation Portfolio testing guide
2. Showcase Portfolio testing guide

These include example workflows, which should give your team a good starting point.

A few quick responses to your questions:

• Demo content/test plans: At this time, we haven’t preloaded demo content in the environment. The goal of the Early Adopter Program is for institutions to explore how the Portfolio tool supports real or representative use cases from their own context. This will help us understand what works and what needs improvement.

• Tags & Skills: You mentioned that tags aren’t currently working on your end — that’s unexpected. Could you let me know more about what you’re seeing and ideally share a screenshot? That would really help us dig into it. 

  • Tags are intended to help organize and highlight artifacts. In Showcase Portfolios, tags allow students to describe their work (e.g., “collaboration,” “UX design”), without necessarily tying them to formal learning outcomes. In Evaluation Portfolios, artifacts can be marked with skills, which can be tied to outcomes that educators can validate.

• Deleting Portfolios: Just to clarify — learners currently cannot delete Showcase Portfolios, and this is expected in the current environment. However, the team is already working on bringing this functionality in a future update.

• Evaluation Portfolios: These can be created from a single course or span multiple courses, depending on what makes sense for your program. This is designed to support everything from course-level assessments to long-term, program-level evaluation. The intended group using these typically includes program leads or faculty overseeing initiatives that use portfolios to evaluate learner progress over time.

• Sharing Options: Sharing is currently in development. The intended experience will include both public and private sharing options, giving students control over how and with whom they share their portfolios.

• Personalization: At this stage, personalization is limited to cover images and descriptions. Profile pictures (like what you see on LinkedIn) haven’t been planned yet, but I love the idea and will pass that feedback along to the team.

Also, as you're exploring and testing, I’d love to hear what use cases you envision this tool supporting at your institution.

Keep the questions and feedback coming!

Y

[jsowalsk]

@Dalma_Schnell Other thoughts that I had were -- adding these items:

Having the ability to link out to social media platforms and embed them in the portfolio.

Being able to provide options for visibility, along with a sharing link.

The ability to preview the portfolio you created.

The ability to add credentials that you have earned from credentials.

[Dalma_Schnell]

Hi @jsowalsk 

These are great suggestions, thank you for sharing them!

If you could take a moment to create a new idea post in the Community to capture these one by one in one place, that would be super helpful. That way others can comment, vote, and help prioritize them alongside the rest of the feedback we're collecting.

Also, just a quick note on credentials — the ability to add earned credentials is already available in the Portfolio! If it’s not working as expected on your end, feel free to share details and I’ll take a closer look.

Really appreciate how thoughtfully you're engaging in the User group!

[jsowalsk]

@Dalma_Schnell 

Thank you for the information.

Regarding tags, it seems as if you can create tags when you create evidence but initially when you see the portfolio you cannot create but you can create achievements and the same thing for skills. What are the use of the tags and who can see them after their created?

  It is great to hear that deleting portfolios, sharing options, and personalization are in the works, but when will this be available for testing. Or is it on the horizon after this is rolled out to production? I feel this is an aggressive timeline and if stuff like this are not added then the portfolio is just bare bones and we are looking for the same basic functionality as we currently have with Portfolium.

[Dalma_Schnell]

Hi @jsowalsk,

Thank you so much for the thoughtful feedback!

You’re absolutely right to point out the confusion around skills and tags. We’ll be adding tooltips in the interface to help clarify these differences. To explain a bit here: skills are pulled from Canvas Credentials badges and represent verified skills based on the metadata of awarded badges. These cannot be manually added by learners. In contrast, tags are customizable and can be added by learners to help categorize and organize their evidence in a way that’s meaningful to them.

Both skills and tags are visible to anyone the learner shares their portfolio with, but their weight and purpose are different—skills reflect verified achievements, while tags provide personal context and organization.

Also, just to confirm—portfolio deletion and sharing options will be available before the official release and they’ll be surfaced for testing soon. These features are actively in development.

Thanks again for highlighting these areas!

[jsowalsk]

@Dalma_Schnell I am not able to create ideas: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Portfolio/idb-p/canvas_portfolioidea-board

[Dalma_Schnell]

Hi @jsowalsk 

It looks like I might be the only one with that permission at the moment. I’ll go ahead and post some of the ideas I’ve heard from you so others can vote and add comments.

Thanks for pointing this out!

[JamesSekcienski]

I agree with the ideas shared by @jsowalsk 

The one that stands out the most to be is the need to allow users to edit their own Showcase Portfolio after it is published.  I was shocked when I started testing that portfolio type and was going to publish what I had done so far and got the warning that I wouldn't be able to edit it again once it was published.  This seems problematic as someone may discover typos or things they need to fix with their content after publishing it, especially if it is only shareable after publishing and they receive feedback.  This also creates unnecessary work to duplicate and/or fully create a portfolio just to add new content to the portfolio.  If a student starts building their portfolio in their first year, they should be able to continue to edit and add to their Showcase Portfolio as they go through college, gain more experience, gain more achievements, and/or have new work they want to share.

As for the tags, based on your described purpose, it would be helpful if tags there was a way to pre-define common tags.  If tags were used for reporting and/or searching in the future, it would be more helpful if there was some encouraged standardization to the tags by offering suggestions rather than users freely entering any value without more details and/or suggestions.  While it is ok for students to enter their own if there isn't a matching suggestion, it would be good to try to get them to use values similar to other users for tags.

[Dalma_Schnell]

Hi @JamesSekcienski ,

Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts! Really great points, and we completely agree with the need for flexibility in Showcase Portfolios.

As we’re still in the EAP phase, we’ve had to make some functionalities available before they’re fully complete and editing after publishing is one of those areas, and it’s something we’re actively addressing. The ability for users to edit their own Showcase Portfolio after publishing will be included in the Feature Preview phase.

As for tags, that’s a valuable suggestion as well. We’ll definitely explore opportunities to support predefined or suggested tags to encourage consistency and make them more useful for future reporting and search capabilities.

Appreciate you taking the time to share this feedback!

[JamesSekcienski]

@Dalma_Schnell 

You're welcome!  I'm glad to hear that being able to edit Showcase Portfolios after publishing will be available in the Feature Preview phase 😀

I look forward to seeing how tags evolve in the future too.

[JamesSekcienski]

Regarding the use case of evaluation portfolios you shared the following above:

• Evaluation Portfolios: These can be created from a single course or span multiple courses, depending on what makes sense for your program. This is designed to support everything from course-level assessments to long-term, program-level evaluation. The intended group using these typically includes program leads or faculty overseeing initiatives that use portfolios to evaluate learner progress over time.

For programs that wait until the end capstone course, it seems potentially possible for the current workflow to support building an evaluation portfolio that incorporates work from across multiple courses.  However, due to the inability to add courses and users once it is published, this doesn't work for programs that have students start building their portfolio at the beginning of their program and add to it throughout the program.  For this use case, there would need to be a way for the evaluation portfolio to follow the student and be able to continue to grow with new future requirements added later in other courses.  Late-added students and/or transfer students also need the ability to get added to an evaluation portfolio that has already been published.

Nonetheless, even programs that wait until the end capstone course would face challenges with adding Canvas assignment requirements from throughout the program history.  Students may have variability in the courses they take based on electives and/or transfer status.  Program leads and/or faculty of the capstone course also are unlikely to be an instructor in all of the course sections that they may want to sample work from (not to mention the multiple sections of courses in a program), so they wouldn't have access to those courses to select work and would need to use more generic requirements instead.  This could also become very tedious to select content from all the past possible courses/sections with the current process even if they did have access.  It would be nice if students could select their own work from a previous course to submit as evidence for a generic project requirement.  This would eliminate the need for the program lead or faculty to try to account for the different possible past courses while still allowing the student to identify their own past work that potentially meets the requirements.  The instructor may consider including in the description examples of past course work that may meet the requirement while keeping it open also for students to submit new original evidence or an improved version of prior course work, if needed.

[Dalma_Schnell]

Hi James, these are fantastic recommendations! I completely agree there's a great opportunity to give learners more flexibility to pull in work from previous Canvas courses to meet portfolio requirements. This would allow students to showcase relevant evidence from varied course paths while reducing the burden on faculty to track or curate that content.

We’re also exploring ways to enable editing of evaluation portfolios in future iterations, so they can grow over time and better support long-term program needs including adding requirements or learners after initial publication.

[JamesSekcienski]

Hello Dalma.  Thank you!  I'm glad to hear these ideas are being considered.  I look forward to seeing how these develop in the future, especially the ability for evaluation portfolios to grow over time.

[JamesSekcienski]

There needs to be a better handling of users that have mixed Canvas roles (i.e. admins, teachers, and/or students).  Users that are teachers/admins also need access as a student in case they are taking classes as a student where they need to submit an evaluation portfolio.

One possible idea I would suggest is to have different views that users can switch between when they have mixed roles that need to be handled different.  Thus, if someone is both a teacher and a student, perhaps it defaults them to the teacher perspective and only shows courses where they are a teacher so they can set-up evaluation portfolios for those classes.  Then, they would have an option to switch to their student view so they can see any assigned evaluation portfolios. 

If they aren't completely separate views, I would recommend at least separating the portfolios into groups.  Perhaps one for personal showcase portfolios.  One for evaluation portfolios they have been assigned to complete as a student.  Then one for evaluation portfolios they have created and/or have access to evaluate.

When creating an evaluation portfolio, it also doesn't make sense for someone to be able to create an evaluation portfolio nor assess an evaluation portfolio that they will be assigned as a student.  At a minimum though, I would expect a warning message with a confirmation if you attempt to create an evaluation portfolio for a course where you are enrolled as a student.

[jsowalsk]

@JamesSekcienski @Dalma_Schnell Along with the ability to have deletion of portfolios for students or if a student left the university an admin or faculty delete it on their behalf. Dalma, could any of this be possible?

[jsowalsk]

@JamesSekcienski I love your ideas!

[Dalma_Schnell]

Hi Jessica,

Yes, this is something we’ve already been considering!

[Dalma_Schnell]

Hi James,

Thanks so much again for surfacing ideas! We’ve heard similar feedback, and we’re actively evaluating how to better support users with mixed Canvas roles. 

I also agree that users shouldn’t be able to create or assess portfolios they’re assigned to complete, and appreciate the idea of introducing safeguards like confirmation messages or restrictions.

These are important workflows we’re factoring into our roadmap, and I love how you help us shape the right experience with your suggestions and ideas. I’ll keep you posted as we explore options here!

[PennyBarter]

Hi Dalma and team! Thank you for the opportunity to test the new portfolio tool - we're really excited about the possibilities! Here are some thoughts/feedback from my testing so far.

Big things

• As others have mentioned (including @JamesSekcienski in this thread!), the ability to edit both the Showcase and Evaluation portfolios is really important to us. In the case of VU Amsterdam, our new Canvas courses are created one semester at a time, which means evaluation portfolios could only be created close to the end of the year/program. Since that's been raised in other places, I'll leave it there.
• In the instructions for creating a portfolio in the Canvas Community, it says "Add an admin user if you want to explore portfolio setup or tracking from an institutional perspective." Does this mean that only users with an admin role will be able to create evaluation portfolios when the tool is live, or is this just for testing purposes?

Small things (nice to have in the future)

• Creating sections for evidence went very smoothly, but I initially struggled with figuring out how to assign evidence requirements to specific sections (ie. knowing to open Manage Sections and go from there). It would be great if evidence requirements could be dragged and dropped between sections on the main portfolio page (like dragging items between modules in Canvas) and/or if it was possible to assign an evidence requirement to an existing section while creating that evidence requirement, perhaps via a dropdown menu (see image 1). I'm not sure if the latter would also work for evidence added from a course though...
• There seems to be a problem with the info button when adding alt text to the portfolio cover image - nothing happens when I click it. I love that the user is required to add alt text before saving the image, but some of our users are unfamiliar with best practices for writing alt text, so having some instructions and examples available is definitely important.
• This is a tiny thing, but in image 2, the little green check symbol next to the skill "Python" looks like the student has achieved this skill, even though the associated evidence has not yet been added to the portfolio. My guess is that the symbol changes to a filled-in green symbol when the skill is documented, but at a glance it's a little misleading for those evaluating the portfolio. I'm not sure what to suggest instead, as a grey symbol would not be readable on the button.

Thanks again for all your hard work!
Penny