Distributing Your Portfolio Project

The Expository Writing Program (EWP) and Freshman Interest Group (FIG) Program both use Catalyst Portfolio and Portfolio Project Builder. The information presented below on distributing your portfolio project is a part of the instructor guide for those programs. The information will also be useful for others seeking to replicate the scaffolded portfolio approach used by EWP and the FIG program.

EWP and FIG Distribution Instructions

EWP and the FIG program use a scaffolded approach to portfolios: instructors create open portfolio projects and share them with students. To distribute the portfolio project to students in accordance with this approach, instructors need to select the following options when distributing their portfolio projects to students.

• Click the button to "Manage Participants" and select "Distribute the project by URL." Do NOT check the box next to "Allow Participants to submit their portfolios for review."
• Under the "I want to" menu, select "Distribute Project Pages," select "Check All Pages," and select "Distribute Now."

When you are ready give your students to access the portfolio project, send them the URL or post it on the course Web page.

Avoiding Common Distribution Problems

There are three common problems that instructors encounter when distributing portfolio project.

• Students cannot make changes to the structure of their portfolios.

Before sending the URL for the portfolio project to students, be sure to double-check that the project is distributed correctly. There are three ways to check for proper distribution. After distribution options have been set, the following message should appear on the Project summary page next to the button for Manage Participants, "Participants will use this link to install a copy of your project (reviewing is disabled)." If this exact message does not appear, check your distribution options. It is also helpful to look at the portfolio project from a student's point of view. Open the URL in a browser, review the portfolio description, and install the portfolio project (scroll to the bottom of the screen and click the "continue" button). The project will open to the portfolio summary. At the bottom of the screen a blue button that says "Publish" should be the only button that appears: a green button that says "Submit" should NOT appear. If you see a green "submit" button, return to the portfolio project and change the distribution options. Additionally, on the portfolio pages, buttons should appear after each section that say "Add section here" and "Delete this section." If you do not see these buttons, return to the portfolio project and change the distribution options.

• Students receive portfolio projects with no pages.

Before sending the URL for the portfolio project to students, be sure to double-check that the project pages are distributed correctly. There are two ways to check for proper distribution. After the pages have been distributed, go to the project summary. Under the table of contents, the letter D should appear in red on the icon next to the portfolio pages. If a red D does not appear, the pages have not been distributed. It is also helpful to look at the portfolio project from a student's point of view. Open the URL in a browser, review the portfolio description, and install the portfolio project (scroll to the bottom of the screen and click the "continue" button). The project will open to the portfolio summary. Under the Table of Contents, links to the portfolio pages should appear. If no links appear, return to portfolio project and distribute the pages.

• Students get error messages when they try to open the portfolio project.

Links to portfolio projects are long. In some email programs, the URL will wrap around two lines of text. When this happens, clicking on the URL will not open the portfolio project. To remedy this problem, ask students to type the complete URL into their Web browser.