Ability to access ePortfolio after graduation?

[jasonact]

My department, a Masters program in mental health counseling, has an ePortfolio assignment that we are considering moving to Canvas's ePortfolio feature. The assignment we have is a project in students' final semester where they gather their cumulative experience and knowledge from their academic education as well as continuing education. Students have often used this as the beginning of their professional website after graduation.

In the past, we recommend students get a free website account, such as with Wix, and build their ePortfolio there. We believe that the Canvas ePortfolio should meet this need much better, with one possible exception. How can students take the ePortfolio with them after graduation? Our students lose access to their Canvas account within 1 semester of graduation. I know students can export their ePortfolio to a .ZIP file, but what is in that .ZIP file? How can that then be used? Is there a way to migrate an ePortfolio to a service outside of Canvas that the student could then manage indefinitely?

[Chris_Hofer]

Hello there, @jasonact ...

Instead of using the ePortfolio feature within Canvas, have you looked into Portfolium?  Instructure and Portfolium partnered together a couple years ago, and Portfolium offers a lot more than the ePortfolio feature in Canvas.  These links may be of interest to you:

• Portfolium - Canvas Community
• Portfolium How-To Guides - Canvas Community

You might want to reach out to your school's local Canvas administrator or your school's Online Learning/eLearning department to see if they have investigated Portfolium.  If I recall, it's a free integration.  You could see if your school's local Canvas admin could contact your assigned Customer Success Manager (CSM) at Instructure to inquire more about this.

I hope this will help a bit.  Let Community members know if you have any other questions about this...thanks!

[dskelley]

To answer your question, the zip file seems to give you two different things:

1. Any work that was attached to the portfolio.
   1. Lets say John attached his Professional Speaking presentation to his portfolio.
   2. When John downloads his portfolio he will see that the zip file contains his Professional Speaking PowerPoint that was submitted to the assignment.
2. What looks like HTML files for the various portfolio pages.
   1. These don't appear to have CSS code, so it's just text and links.

Now, if the student snags their preview link and shares that, then someone can go through their portfolio and see all of it's content without having to sign into Canvas or anything.

Here is what my example portfolio looks like: https://ufl.instructure.com/eportfolios/17133?view=preview

In terms of what Chofer said, Portfolium looks like a nicer version of portfolios. I haven't had time to explore Portfolium myself, but I imagine it has to be better then portfolios. While Portfolios is a cool feature, it is very clunky and even making this example for you was time consuming.