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Canvas Portfolio offers two distinct types of portfolios for use by students, faculty and staff.
Showcase Portfolios
Showcase Portfolios are user-driven and designed to display curricular and extracurricular work. Users can create up to 100 individual showcase portfolios to organize their work samples and share them with users outside of the university. Work can be added as new evidence, allowing users to upload existing files and provide additional reflection and descriptions, or to connect to existing Canvas course assignments.
Note: When adding a new piece of evidence to the portfolio, the "Add assignment from course" option only links to the Canvas assignment and does not make the submission shareable to outside users. This is scheduled to be addressed in a future update (expected by June 2026).
Evaluation Portfolios
Evaluation Portfolios are highly structured, scaffolded portfolios created by a faculty member and assigned to one or more Canvas courses. Evaluation Portfolios allow the faculty to identify specifically what should be included, and presents a dashboard of progress to the faculty member.
In its current state, Evaluation portfolios:
- Are assigned to an entire course roster - these cannot be assigned to specific students (i.e. only majors).
- Can only be viewed by the creator. This prevents review by committee or shared Evaluation Portfolios within a department.
- Cannot be edited after publishing. Any necessary changes would require duplicating the existing Evaluation Portfolio and deleting the original. This can cause student work to be lost.
Due to these technical limitations, Academic Technology does not recommend using Evaluation Portfolios for any scope beyond a single class. We are working with Canvas’s product teams to push for further improvements that would allow for Evaluation Portfolio use across multiple semesters and facilitate collaboration amongst faculty for creation and review.
If you have any questions about how best to implement Canvas Portfolio in your courses, please contact Academic Technology.