You’ve configured your course completely, checked all your assignment settings, created your custom grading scheme, and are ready to begin the semester! When you reach this point, don’t forget the most important final step: publishing your course to make sure that students can access it. Careful attention to this feature of Canvas, can ensure that you and your students will have a great launch to your semester in Canvas.
The Difference Between Published and Unpublished
Once all of your content is created and organized in the Modules Tab, you need to be sure that it is all correctly published in order to start your courses off successfully! Any material that is unpublished in your canvas course will not be visible to your students.
So, to identify whether something is published, look to the right of the content item’s name where you’ll see either a Green Check Mark icon, meaning the item is Published, or a Circle and Slash icon, which means that the item is Unpublished.
Which Content Should be Published?
Within Canvas, publishing needs to happen on several levels:
Individual content
Individual Content Items such as pages, quizzes, discussions, assignments, and external links all need to be published, as shown below, in order to be visible to your students.
Complete modules
Modules Click the Green Check Mark icon to the right of the module name (as shown below) to publish or un-publish it. Note that, when you publish a Module, any unpublished individual content items within the module will automatically be published. Therefore, you may want to postpone publishing a module until all module items are ready for student viewing. Or, you can publish the Module and then un-publish individual items that you would like to remain invisible to your students.
The whole course
Your Course, of course! Most importantly, make sure that your whole course is published! This is something that can't be overlooked because if your course isn’t published, students won’t be able to view any of its content, or even see the course tile on their dashboard. You can publish the course in the top right-hand corner on your homepage, as shown below.