Publishing the Course

When you have the required elements in the course (a syllabus, assignments, and a gradebook), you need to publish your course before the first day of class. Your students cannot access the course until you publish it!

Publish your course following the steps below.

Open your course from the Canvas Dashboard. Your default page is the Homepage for the course.
On this page, there’s a sidebar menu titled Course Status. From this menu, click the Publish button.

Publishing the course sends an invitation to students to join the course.

It’s important to note that pages and assignments are also individually published. In other words, publishing a course does not automatically make every page published. You can individually determine which elements of the course are visible to your students using the steps outlined in Creating and Editing a Page instructions that you viewed earlier.

Here's how you can quickly see which elements of your course are visible to your students:

From the course menu, click the Modules button. A list of the modules and pages in your course displays.
Green spots with a check mark indicate a module or page is published. Gray spots indicate a module or page is unpublished.
Click a gray spot to publish the element. The spot turns green.
Click a green spot to unpublish the element. The spot turns gray.

Please note the "element hierarchy" of publishing:

Even when a page is published within a module, this page is not visible to students if the module is unpublished.
Even if a module is published, it is not visible to students if the course is unpublished.