How to unpublish a course with graded assignments (or modify dashboard)

[tboult]

I've read various posts here and it seems one cannot unpublish a course.  This is not about student access to it, I know how to fix that, its about the very cluttered interface when there are dozens of "published" course in your dashboard.   I have 75 courses in my list and I like to keep archived ones for comparison to what I did before, but its too messy to have them all in published.   

I cannot understand the rationale for not allowing unpublishing. Once students lost access it is effectively unpublished to them, so why make it stay published and mess with the UI? 

[rmurchshafer · Accepted solution]

As you mentioned you can't unpublish a course that has grades in it.  But you can control which courses appear on your Dashboard which it sounds like is really your main goal.  Here is a link to a guide for customizing your course list https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-customize-my-Courses-list-as-an-instruc... 

Once you set up favorites, only those will show on your Dashboard but you can also get to your others by clicking on Courses, View all Courses.

Rick

[KyleBarnabus]

Hi Rick

Thank for the information provided.

What If needed to Unpublish a course to perform a Cross List, but cant cause there are graded student submissions. could you advise a possible work around?

@rmurchshafer 

[rmurchshafer]

You shouldn't have to unpublish a course to cross list.  But, keep in mind that when you cross-list NO STUDENT DATA IS MOVED. So any submissions or grades in the class being cross listed will not move over to the other course, just the roster.  Because of this it's always advised to cross list before a class starts.  Having said that, if losing the student data is not a big deal you should still be able to cross list a section even after the course has been published.

Rick