Portfolio Visibility and Cross-Course Evaluation Limitations

[YoshuaHarahap]

Hi all,

At our institution, we use student portfolios as part of a formal evaluation process that involves multiple instructors across different disciplines. However, during our testing of the Canvas Portfolio feature, we discovered that the evaluation portfolio is only visible to the student and the portfolio initiator. Other faculty members assigned as teachers in the course are unable to view or participate in the evaluation (give a comment or review).

This limitation poses a challenge for us, as our ideal use case involves interdisciplinary evaluation, where instructors from various courses can access and assess a student's portfolio collaboratively. Unfortunately, this cross-course visibility and collaboration does not seem possible with the current version of the portfolio tool (the collaborator feature is for among peer students and not for team teaching).

In our past evaluation practice, the admin or the Department of Online Learning was responsible for managing the portfolio process. They would assign faculty members to designated students for evaluation, ensuring that all relevant instructors could participate regardless of course boundaries.

At this point, our best solution is to ask students to create a showcase portfolio. Once completed, they manually share the link with the faculty committee for review. While this workaround may work with limitations, it undermines the concept of a synchronized portfolio that automatically reflects a student’s work across all completed courses, something that evaluation portfolios (should) fit best. 

I am wondering:

• Has anyone found another workaround or solution for this?

• Are there institutions with similar needs that have successfully implemented a portfolio evaluation process involving multiple instructors?

• Is there any roadmap or feature in development that might address this limitation?

We’d greatly appreciate any insights, suggestions, or shared experiences. Sorry for the long post.

Thanks in advance for your help!

[RetaChaffee]

We experienced the same thing in our testing.  It is a show-stopper for us.  Some other things we noticed: 

• As an admin with account level access (adapted instructor role),  I was also not able to see the portfolio in the course.  The only way I could see it was to impersonate the instructor. 
• We copy courses from term to term.  In some cases it is not the same instructor.  The new instructor would not be able to see the portfolio.

Our model is also to use the portfolio across multiple courses, so this would make it challenging. 

We were thinking about maybe require students to create their own showcase portfolio for their degree program where they would add designated activities along with other things they would like to add themselves. There would be a program requirement to submit (give access to) their final showcase portfolio in the capstone course.

In the documentation, they mention "Institutions collecting evidence for accreditation across programs and departments" under Real-World Use Cases.  So maybe there is more to it than what I am testing. 

Reta