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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 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:

Published =

Unpublished =

Hide Entire Modules: You can quickly hide an entire module 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Unpublished module

Hide Individual Items in Modules: Each item can be published or unpublished the same way.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:

Unpublished pages in a module

Tips

When to Publish: Keep your course unpublished until you are ready for students to see it.
Availability Dates: If you have availability dates applied to items, they will not be visible to students until that day (even through Student View).
Check for broken links: Before you publish your course, in Settings in the right side menu, run the tool "Validate Links in Content" to find any broken links that need to be fixed.

Canvas Instructor Guides

Need more information? Check out these Canvas Guides:

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 re-publish.
Go to Files and browse through the folders looking for items that need to be published.