Problem

Students need a place to showcase their work and track their learning. This includes accommodating a variety of data formats like images, text, potentially figma or anything else students might use

Teachers struggle with a clean solution that facilitates monitoring while having the flexibility to customize/ scaffold learning.

Creating a system to manage 40–160++ portfolios can be a nightmare especially when students often ignore the headings and structures recommended for physical portfolios.

Existing options and alternatives

• Google Sites — this is reasonably user-friendly but has to be public. SAJC has used this for tracking learning of work attachments previously which can definitely work especially if you are already familiar with the Google ecosystem!
• Carrd — simple web page but probably not the best for portfolio management

Both Google Sites and Carrd, however, can be difficult to track and also difficult to enforce a particular structure/ template.

Why not Student Learning Space (SLS) or do it on a Learning Management System (LMS)?

It does not meet the idea of a ‘portfolio’, namely expectations of possibly

1) using it for external submission/ publishing to the web

2) long term persistence beyond the students’ time horizon being part of the learning management system. For example, as a JC teacher, I may not be inclined to constrain students to a system that they won’t use post A levels.

Probably as a product decision, this should be a space that SLS should not enter, especially not given the specs and competing priorities.

Users

Primary users are educators who will then implement this portfolio system for students to use. Ideally educators are invested in structuring this learning process in a slightly more involved way — otherwise the more free-form alternatives listed above works

Ideation