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Why It's Important
Key Takeaways
Tips
Canvas Instructor Guides
Try It!

Why It's Important

In Canvas, you can control the visibility of your course and each course item through publishing and unpublishing. This is how you hide course items from students and make them visible.

Key Takeaways

Preview Week: Enrolled students will have access to their Canvas courses up to 1 week prior to the start of the term, but they won't see anything in the course until you publish it.
Student Visibility: Students can only access published items inside the course.
Course Publishing: When your course is published, it moves to the top of your dashboard under Published Courses. On the home page of a published course, you will see "Published" in green under Course Status in the upper right corner:

*A Side-by-Side Example Demonstrating Published vs. Unpublished Course Status*
Published	Unpublished

Hide Entire Modules: You can quickly hide an entire module (including all of its content) by unpublishing just the text header of the module. In this case, you can see that the publish button in the text header is grey, so everything in this module is hidden:

Unpublished sample module with a grey unpublished icon in the text header

Hide Individual Items in Modules: Each item can be published or unpublished the same way. In this example, the module is published, but the last two pages are hidden:

Sample published module with two unpublished pages, indicated by the grey icon of a circle with a line through it

Tips

Canvas Navigation menu with the following options: share to commons, course statistics, course calendar, import course, content, export course content, and validate links in content with a blue callout box around it

Canvas Instructor Guides

Need more information? Check out these Canvas Guides:

How do I publish or unpublish a course?
How do I publish or unpublish a module?

Try It!

Go to your Sandbox and practice publishing and unpublishing by completing these tasks:

On your dashboard, publish and unpublish your Sandbox course.
Go to Pages > All Pages and select a page to unpublish and republish.
Go to Files and browse through the folders looking for items that need to be published.