In Canvas, publishing refers to making an item available, or visible, to students. Instructors will need to publish their course and content items within the course to ensure students can see what they need to complete course work.

Publishing a Course

A course must be published before students are able to see the course in Canvas. Please review the Canvas Instructor Guide to learn how to publish your course.

In Canvas, you must publish a course before students will get a notification about course messages or announcements. To publish a course and send a message to students through the Inbox, while also keeping the course unavailable to students, you must edit the course participation start date to be in the future, as well as choosing the option to Restrict students from viewing course before the course start date.
In Canvas, you won’t be able to unpublish a course once it has a graded submission. If you wish to make the class unavailable to students, you can edit the course participation end date to be in the past.

Publishing Course Content

It is also important to publish content so that students are able to view the content in the course. Within Modules, you can publish an entire module, or specific items within the module. It is also important to publish pages, publish discussions and publish quizzes. By default, not all tools/links within the course navigation are visible to students. If you wish to manage the course navigation, you will need to take additional steps as well. If at any point, you want to confirm what is visible to students, use the Student View function.

Student View option in a Canvas course.