Many higher education institutions (HEIs) are faced with the need to rethink their assessment strategies. Due to the rise of generative AI tools available to students, institutions across the sector are increasingly moving towards AI-resistant assessment strategies. As we’ve previously seen, many of these strategies centre around adopting holistic, process-based, and longitudinal approaches to assessment.
Now, the urgent question for assessment professionals and curriculum designers is: How can we implement these strategies at scale, while delivering a platform that staff and students genuinely find usable?
In this article, we’ll explore how Portflow is used by institutions across the world to facilitate AI-resistant assessment at scale. By serving as an extension to your institutional LMS, Portflow provides a verifiable record of authentic student learning. Here is a practical look at how Portflow supports AI-resistant assessment.
Enabling Holistic Assessment: The Multi-Modal Evidence Hub
Need: Assessment must evolve beyond the single artefact (e.g. written essays) that AI excels at generating. To be truly secure, it is necessary to have diverse, contextual evidence that testifies to a comprehensive, holistic view of a student’s true competence.
| Portflow Feature | How it Supports AI-Resistant Assessment |
|---|---|
| Evidence collection | Students can upload multi-modal artefacts (video, audio, documents, external links) from any learning context, such as coursework, work-integrated learning, or extracurricular activities. This diversity of evidence makes the body of evidence exponentially harder for an AI to create. |
| Seamless VLE Integration | Portflow integrates deeply with your existing Learning Management System (or Virtual Learning Environment in the UK). Students can easily import submitted coursework (including feedback), as well as evidence from non-academic contexts. This allows each student to capture their personal learning journey, and provide a richer picture of their progress in achieving their goals. |
| Curated Snapshots | Apart from serving as a development portfolio, Portflow is also suited for use as a (summative) assessment portfolio. Learners can create curated selections from their live development portfolio as snapshots. These snapshots are ‘frozen’ copies of (parts of) their portfolio, and can be submitted right back in an LMS assignment. As a result, instructors can use the familiar and powerful LMS grading environment to review or mark the assessment portfolio, while still being able to navigate through all the rich content, reflections, feedback, and narrative contained in the portfolio. |
Capturing Process-Based Assessment: The Iterative Learning Process
Need: One of the most secure approaches in fostering AI-resistant assessment is valuing process over product. Assessment must evaluate a student’s journey, their iterative thinking, and their authentic engagement with feedback (Kalra, 2019; Berkeley Center for Teaching & Learning, 2024).
| Portflow Feature | How it Supports AI-Resistant Assessment |
|---|---|
| Iterative Feedback Loops | Portflow enables a continuous feedback dialogue. Students can track multiple drafts of an evidence entry and receive granular feedback on each iteration. This visibility into the development process safeguards against “last-minute” AI generation, as the assessor can easily verify the authentic, incremental steps taken. |
| 360° Feedback & External Validation | Students can invite external users, such as placement supervisors, to provide direct feedback on artefacts within the portfolio. This secure, external validation of skills in a real-world setting helps ensure that the student has actually progressed towards their goals. |
| Encouraging reflection & learning logs | Portflow facilitates structured reflection, prompting students to document how and why they progressed, not just what they produced. These reflections are unique to the learner, and help them to be more engaged with their own learning process. |
Longitudinal Assessment: Visualising Continuous Growth
Need: Since AI generates content for a single moment, longitudinal assessment strategies that record student learning over a sustained period (Walker, 2025) can help to create a more secure and reliable assessment process.
| Portflow Feature | How it Supports AI-Resistant Assessment |
|---|---|
| Focus on learner journey | Portflow is designed to capture a student’s entire learning journey, from day one of their studies all the way to graduation & beyond. This ensures the integrity of a longitudinal record of their progress, and creates a continuous developmental timeline that spans the entire curriculum. |
| Programme-Level Mapping | Portflow allows institutions to create templates that incorporate Goals, which are typically reflective of skills, competencies or other types of programme-level learning outcomes (PLOs). This enforces the longitudinal view by structuring the portfolio to show competence building across learning contexts (captured in the different Collections). |
How Portflow facilitates AI-resistant assessment at scale
Another significant advantage of Portflow lies in its deep integration with your existing LMS (Canvas, Brightspace, Blackboard, Moodle). This allows institutions to take the aforementioned approaches to AI-resistant assessment, and adopt them at scale.
- For Students: Because Portflow operates as a familiar extension of the LMS, it severely reduces the learning curve associated with adopting a new tool. Students don’t have to find a link that is buried somewhere in their Sharepoint, but can easily start using their e-portfolio.
- For Academics: The integration dramatically lowers the barrier to adoption for staff, allowing them to embed portfolio assignments into existing workflows. This is because Portflow is fully compatible with LMS assignments, allowing instructors to use the familiar assignment and grading environment of the LMS to request and grade portfolio submissions. This ensures that the shift to holistic and process-based assessment can happen efficiently across entire programmes, without requiring staff to learn a new assessment system.
- For Administrators: The integration with the LMS means there is no additional burden for IT management. Furthermore, the integration of Portflow with LMS assignment ensures that the assessment data captured within Portflow is readily integrated with existing academic review and quality assurance processes.
By meeting all stakeholders where they already work, Portflow helps facilitate these complex assessment approaches at scale.
Moving Beyond Detection of AI Work
Portflow helps shift the conversation away from detecting student work generated with AI to redesigning assessment for the future (of AI). By utilising Portflow, HEIs can not only react to AI, but instead proactively adopt a robust, future-proof assessment design that ensures every graduate outcome is based on verifiable, authentic competence.
Ready to move your (redesigned) assessment policy from paper to practice?
Sources
Berkeley Center for Teaching & Learning. (2024). Valuing process equal to or greater than product. University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved from https://teaching.berkeley.edu/valuing-process-equal-or-greater-product
Walker, S. (2025). Trends in assessment in higher education: considerations for policy and practice. Jisc. Retrieved from https://www.jisc.ac.uk/reports/trends-in-assessment-in-higher-education-considerations-for-policy-and-practice
Kalra, J. (2019). Focusing assessment on process and product. In Encourage Academic Integrity. BCcampus. Retrieved from https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/encourageacademicintegrity/chapter/focusing-assessment-on-process-and-product/
About the Author: Thomas Ohlenforst
