publishing part but not all of course

[RichardHyslop]

The campus moved some of my courses from Blackboard to Canvas (a helpful thing).  But I do not want to "publish" the whole course, but just parts of it.  Isn this possible, or do I just start over with a new course listing?

[Chris_Hofer · Accepted solution]

@RichardHyslop ...

When you publish a course, you are making the course itself available to your students.  However, as you design your course content, you can choose whether or not to publish certain things in your course or hide them from students until you are ready to release the content.  For example, you can publish or hide content pages, quizzes, discussions, and assignments.  You can even publish or hide entire modules that contain those pages, quizzes, discussions, and assignments.  If you don't publish entire modules, the items in those modules won't be accessible to students until you publish the modules.

Does this help to answer your question?

[RickNelsonSC]

How do you hide or publish "certain things"?  How do you publish only the Syllabus?  I see that Modules can be published separately, but I don't see how the Syllabus can be put into a Module.

[Chris_Hofer]

@RickNelsonSC ...

The "Syllabus" page cannot be put into the "Modules" page.  The "Syllabus" page is a separate item on its own located on the left-hand course navigation menu of your course.  [There isn't really a "publish" icon (green checkmark) for the Syllabus.  It's just visible to students as long as it isn't hidden from students.]  You can enable or hide most course navigation menu items in your course by following the instructions in this Guide:

How do I manage Course Navigation links?

So, for example, if you hid the "Grades" course navigation menu in your course (so there was a crossed-out eye icon next to it), then no students would be able to access their own Grades page in your course.

With respect to the "Modules" page...  you can build out the modules of your course (organizing them by Week, Lesson Plan, Subject, etc.), and then you can add as many items (Pages, Discussions, Quizzes, Assignments, etc.) as you want to each module.  In order for your students to be able to access the items within a given module, the items within the module need to be published, but the module itself also needs to be published.  If, however, there are some items within your module (for example, an assignment) that you don't yet want your students to access, you can leave the item unpublished until you are ready to make it available to your students.

• How do I publish or unpublish a module as an instructor? (Check out the section under "View Status of All Modules" and the sub-headings under it on the ways you can publish/unpublish items.
• You can also publish/unpublish items individually.  Here's an example of how you can publish/unpublish assignments.  The directions are similar for other types of content like Pages, Discussions, and Quizzes.  How do I publish or unpublish an assignment as an instructor?

I hope this information will be of some help to you.  Sing out if you have more questions about this...thanks!

[RickNelsonSC]

Thanks, very helpful.  One shortcoming in the help pages is it doesn't show where to find the Settings link (an age-old problem with Help systems!).  On my laptop, it was being obscured by a URL pop-up/tooltip lol.  Took a while to find it...

[Chris_Hofer]

@RickNelsonSC ...

You are most welcome!

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One shortcoming in the help pages is it doesn't show where to find the Settings link (an age-old problem with Help systems!).

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I'm not sure I follow.  If you take a look at the list of Guides for course "Settings", almost all of them in this section start out by instructing people to click on the "Settings" course navigation menu on the left side of your Canvas environment.  Do you have something else installed as a plug-in, by chance, in your browser that was preventing you from seeing course "Settings"?

Looking forward to hearing back from you on this.  Thanks!