Early Course Access for Students in Canvas

This page describes settings in your Canvas course to control student access to various content.

If you want students to be able to see things in your course prior to the start of the semester:

1

Click on Settings then uncheck the option "Restrict students from viewing this course before start date" and click on Update Course Details

 
2

Publish the course by going to the course Home and clicking Publish

With this done, students WILL be able to:

  • send and receive messages sent through the Inbox (Canvas mail)
  • view the course syllabus page
  • view published announcements
  • see published, available assignments
    (If you want some assignments to not be visible you can unpublish them, or add an availability date with a future date.)
  • view published pages, files, and modules

Until the first day of the semester, students WILL NOT be able to:

  • submit assignments
  • post to discussion boards
  • receive notifications of announcements
  • view unpublished content or content within unpublished modules

If you don't want students to be able to see content:

Leave the default checked to Restrict students from viewing this course before start date on the course Settings page. You can publish the course, but it won't be available to students until the start of the course.

To communicate with students via email, go to the People page in your Canvas course and click on the Email All Students button. This will open up your default mail program and create a new message with the students emails in the BCC field.

If you don't have a default mail account set-up, you can use the Download Class Roster button on the People page to download a csv list of your students so that you can email them.

Other Course Date Settings

The start and end dates of the courses are controlled by Banner. If you make changes to those dates they will be changed back upon the next sync, usually by the end of the day. This is not an effective way of making courses available to students before the start of the semester.