Publishing Your Course

As with all content in Canvas, your course as a whole must also be published before students can access it. Prior to publishing your course, students can not:

Receive Inbox messages associated with the course
Be notified of course Announcements
See the course on their Dashboard
Enter the course or view course materials

To publish your course, make sure you are on the course Home page and find the Course Status in the top right.

Click Publish to publish the course. You can also publish unpublished courses directly from your Dashboard. Currently-unpublished courses will be grouped at the bottom of your Dashboard. Click the Publish button to publish.

Unpublishing Your Course

Courses that have been published can also be unpublished. However, no course that has had student work submitted to it can be unpublished. If your course does not have submitted student work yet, you can unpublish by going to the course Home page, finding the Course Status at the top right and clicking Unpublish.

Controlling Student Access to Published Courses

Since you cannot unpublish courses with submitted student work, there are several other options for controlling access to the course once the semester is over. Please note that the University does not automatically enforce any of these options nor impose start-and-end dates on courses.

You are free to leave the course published and active if you desire.
You can manually conclude the course. Concluding a course will turn the course read-only, meaning that both you and enrolled students will be able to view the content in it, but there is no ability to change anything (including grades).
You can use start and end dates to automatically revoke student view access to the course after a certain date (or simply conclude the course for students so they can continue to view it in a read-only state).

To Manually Conclude a Course

Open your course Settings
Locate the Conclude this Course button on the right
Confirm that you wish to conclude the course.

Note that you cannot "unconclude" a course once you have performed this action. Please contact edtech@teaching.pitt.edu if you have concluded a course in error.

To Use Course Start and End Dates

Open your course Settings
Make sure you are on the Course Details tab
Scroll down to the Starts and Ends headings
Enter your desired course start and/or end dates in the boxes [A]. Note that you need not enter a course start date, even if you are going to be using an end date.
Select any desired additional effects triggered by the course start and end dates such as rendering the course read-only for students [B], restricting students from viewing the course entirely after the end date [C] or restrict students from seeing a course (even if it is published) before the start date [D].

Instructor Help for Publishing

How do I publish a course?
How do I conclude a course at the end of a term as an instructor?
How do I change the start and end dates for a course?
How do I restrict student access to a course before or after the course dates?

Student Help for Concluded Courses

How do I view my grades in a concluded course?