Portfolios has potential - but it has a very long way to go. Is it ready for GA?

[p_a_hudson]

Hi,

We are really interested in the new Portfolio tool as an alternative to using something like Pebblepad, which is far too complicated for the majority of use-cases. In our admittedly limited testing, we've found some issues. We were going to leave it to see how the tool develops over the next few months as it seems like a very early beta. However, you seem to now think it is ready for general release. 

"On November 15, 2025, we’re excited to make Canvas Portfolio generally available (GA) to all Canvas LMS customers at no additional cost. "

I don't feel like portfolios is ready for general release. Is this date correct? 

So here's my feedback. It's two part. First part, is about your direction of travel. From using the product. I don't know what you intend to do with the product and fear it become another abandoned development rather than actually the core part of putting the learning into the student's hands. The second part, covers some serious issues that limit the current implementation for live use.

Canvas should be a personal learning platform

From my perspective, an evidence portfolio is a pedagogical development tool that helps provide the framework to help students understand their learning and develop higher-level Blooms. Most portfolios are a 'portfolio showcasing evidence'. Gathering evidence, either automatically or through reflection, helps students understand their learning. That means that the core system - in this case Canvas, should be encouraging students to constantly reflect on activities within their course. These reflections, can be frameworked, say as part of the submission process, or by staff creating progression activities in their modules, or be persona reflections. A learning portfolio gathers this evidence into one place and ideally, has its own user-level framework to encourage general reflections throughout the course. Something like your showcase portfolios, are then used for students to repurpose exiting evidence for presentation to others. Things like Canvas badges, should be an active part of the evidential side of the portfolio as they act as confirmation of say achieving learning outcomes in modules. Likewise, surfacing all their learning outcomes in one place, with evidence of where they have submitted relative learnings, could also be part of their personal evidence tool. 

Every activity within Canvas is potentially evidence of a students learning and c(sh)ould be surfaced through a central repository. Things like your new tagging system, could have the ability to tag skills development throughout a course and for those tags to appear in the student's evidence repository so that students can quickly see where skills have been taught, practiced and assessed. (These can then drive learning analytics)

Helping students understand the skills they are developing is important after they graduate. Career sectors and job types, usually require students with certain types of skills. There are services that will provide skills mappings for industry sectors. A repository of their skills would them make it easy to surface evidence when they construct their showcase portfolio, with guides for the kind of skills the potential employer might be expecting. Essentially, helping students prepare for interviews. 

A portfolio with an evidence repository and reflection tool would help student structure their reflections on their learning. I can see you have all the pieces to fairly rapidly build a personal learning tool. But it doesn't feel like this is what you are building. It's currently looks like a presentation tool for some rather limited types of evidence? But it seems to me you have most of the components to change Canvas from a delivery system into a true personal learning platform.

Anyway, there's some thoughts on direction. You have the potential to create an amazing reflection tool. However....

Current limitations with Portfolios

From my short amount of time testing. There are several limitations with the current product. 

• Evidence types are limited and pretty much identical to each other. It's not clear that there is any advantage to the types being used. It would be nice to be able to have a pro-forma evidence type where staff can create their own evidence category. I would also like to see a generic 'reflection' evidence type. One that creates a reflective section where students can continually add to their reflections throughout a course. One example use, would be a placement portfolio. Currently, it looks like students would have to edit, and re-edit one say the experience evidence type. I would also like to see students being able to enhance an evidence portfolio with their own additional evidence, rather than simply being limited by what the template allows them to do.
• Evidence cannot be shared between portfolios - you can only copy the whole portfolio. (See above about an evidence repository)
• Course syncing is missing. Students added to a module after the portfolio has been published, do not see the portfolio. This makes the portfolio pretty useless for our uses. We have several use-cases where we want to release a portfolio that is completed across the academic year.
• Module-level LTI embedding seems pointless at the moment. Instead of auto provisioning access to staff and students on click, like other LTIs do - including your own, it just drops students and staff into their own portfolio tool. The Module level LTI really should act as a filter and show portfolios for that module and staff with edit rights, given access to edit and assess related submissions. 
• There's no way for a team of staff to manage a portfolio. It seems the only person who sees feedback is the person who created the evidence portfolio.So there's no way to share the marking load, or to take another member of staff's portfolio and apply it their own module. 
• There's no integration with Speedgrader. You can't set up a 'portfolio' submission and grade the submissions. Most of our use-cases are for a graded portfolio. Staff would expect to be able to use Speedgrader to view and mark these portfolios.
• The current review screen, only shows 10 students. There's no way to filter new submissions. There's no way to share marking with other staff. Great if you have 10 students. But if you have 1000? How exactly would you mark these portfolios.
• There doesn't appear to be a way to preview a evaluation template (understandably, the test student can't be used due to how the portfolios sit outside of a module)
• I expected the mini dashboard at the top of the marking screen, to filter based on each category. 
• Marking the portfolio is cumbersome. There needs to be an expanded version of portfolio so that staff don't have to click into each section. They can simply review everything on the same page and then 'pass' the whole portfolio in one go. If there are elements that need to be reviewed, then staff click into the chat view. For example, an version that expands when displayed for marking in Speedgrader.
• In the staff 'marking' screen. The default sort order is different to the people and grade book sort order.
• Sharing - we need institutional controls over what can be shared and when. We would ideally block external publishing until we are confident that we can deal with GDPR issues
• Related to GDPR issues - if a student shared some evidence that contained sensitive information - say patient data - currently we have no central admin facilities to remove the evidence or delete their portfolio.
• It is not clear what the retention policy is for portfolios. If we delete a module. The related activities are deleted. But as the portfolio sits outside of the module. How would we delete on mass, old portfolios? 
• Staff and students should be able to share with an individual.
• We expected a basic set of templates that could be applied to module and for students to use to keep their own personal reflections. 
• There doesn't appear to be any way to create institutional templates. For example, to surface a set of 'reflection' activities for a student to use at different times of the year. Or maybe even a personal tutor 'portfolio' that allows students to gather evidence to share with their personal tutor
• Related to 'personal tutor'. There needs to be some way to surface securely, assessments shared as part of a portfolio to those who aren't members of the module team. (Say a personal tutor). 
• There's no option to enable the module-level LTI navigation, but default it to be to an optional item that staff can drag into the navigation if they are using the tool. i.e. the 'visibility: admin' you can add LTI's you set up manually.

There's probably more. But these were obvious issues from a few hours of testing. 

Sorry, for the long post. 

[adamwarecx]

Hi @p_a_hudson - Appreciate your thoughtful, researched and constructive feedback on this topic.

The immediate goal is to have a singular foundational portfolio tool natively available to all Canvas LMS users and remove legacy solutions. As the sole native solution, our teams can then scale with greater efficiency and speed to meet the ever changing requirements modern education brings (some of which might be mentioned in your post 😉).

As they say, all journey's start with one step - this our our first. Keep the feedback coming in!