Publish Your Canvas Course

Are you ready to make your content available to students? Publish it.

Once you have added the content you want students to see, it's time to publish your course:

1

Check to make sure the content you want students to see is visible in the course by publishing it

Be sure to publish assignments, quizzes, pages, files, and modules.

unpublished content indicated by circle with slash

 
2

Publish the course by going to the course Home and clicking the Unpublished dropdown menu and choosing Publish

Canvas homepage showing published page status

With this done prior to the start of the semester, 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

On the first day of the semester, students will be able to:

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  • view unpublished content or content within unpublished modules

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.