Publishing and Availability

This page includes visual steps on how to publish and make your course available to students. 

Instructors

Publishing Content

After building your course, you must Publish it in order for it to be accessible and available to students and enrollees.

On the Home page, click Publish under the "Course Status" (top right corner of the screen). This will publish the course in its entirety.

Students will not be able to access or view your course until it is published. Moreover, you will not be able to send messages to students enrolled in the course until it is published.

  The Publish button will turn green once your course is published.

To ensure everything is published, check your course modules and ensure each piece of content has a green check mark next to it including the Module itself. Everything with this green check mark will be visible to course enrollees.

 

NOTE: If you have unpublished course items in an unpublished module (re: files, assignments, quizzes, pages, links), these items will become published when you publish the module. In short, publishing a module will publish everything in that module.

 

To unpublish the course, click Unpublish on the homepage. To unpublish individual modules or course items, make sure the course item has an unpublished icon next to it.

Course Availability Dates

Through a feature update on 03/20/2021, course participation and visibility dates may be selected through Term or Course in the course settings.

New courses in Canvas are defaulted to Term Dates set by the Canvas Administrators as well as viewing but no participation after the end date. These term dates set student course participation to start and end on the dates defined for that term (Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer). However, term dates may be overridden by course instructors to provide students with different types of access to the course either before or after the set term dates. 

 

  1. Within the course navigation menu on the left-hand side of the course, click on Settings.

  2. Further within the Course Details tab, Participation is defaulted to Term.

     

  3. These settings may be changed to allow students to access the course either before or after the Term Dates. First, select Course in the drop-down menu and set a Start and End Date:


    NOTE:     If the End date of a course is set at 12:00am, a warning will appear stating that the prior date will be the last day of the course. For example, if the end date is set to May 21, 2021 at 12:00AM, the actual end date of the course will be May 20, 2021 at 11:59PM.
     

  4. Regardless if Course or Term dates are selected, students viewing and participation may then be set using the same methods for the time after the course has ended. For example, if today was May 24, 2021 and the desire was to do any of the following:

    Allowing viewing, but not participation:  Leave the two restriction boxes unchecked. Click Save.


    Restrict viewing:     Check the appropriate restriction boxes. Click Save. These will take the course off of the students’ dashboards.

    Allow participation: Choose the Course participation and select a date in the future. Click Save. NOTE: This provides participation access to all students enrolled in the course.


    Add additional users to your course after the end date:     First, choose the Course participation and select a date in the future. Click Save. You should then be able to add new users to the course. After adding the new user(s), return the settings to their previous specifications.