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Canvas Course States Comparison

Canvas Course States Comparison

Canvas courses have three essential states: unpublished, published, and concluded.

Course States Definition

Unpublished

Unpublished courses are courses in preparation; they are courses being authored by instructors, instructional designers, and administrators. While a course is unpublished, students cannot access or participate in the course. When the course material is deemed ready by the designer, instructor, or administrator, it may be published.

These courses appear in the Future Enrollments section of the Courses menu. Unless you or your Canvas admin restrict permission to view future courses, and students can access their future enrollments in their Courses list before the course start date.

If a course is never published, the course will remain in the students' Future Enrollments section.

Published

Published courses are instantly available to students who may be assigned via SIS integration, or manually by the instructor, administrator, or TA. When published, activity is dictated by the dates and status of course assignments and modules. Individual assignments, modules, or other course content can be individually locked (made unavailable to students) or assigned a date in the future, prior to which students will not be able to see or participate in said course component.

If courses are set within term dates, these courses appear in the My Courses section of the Courses menu. However, if courses have course participation dates and have different start dates, the courses appear in the Future Enrollments section until the course participation start date. Publishing your course will send invitations to any users who were manually added to your course. Users added via SIS import will not receive an invitation.

Concluded Courses

Concluded courses are courses that are completed according to the SIS information or term dates, or courses that have been manually marked complete by an instructor or administrator. In a concluded course, instructors and students can no longer participate in the course and the course is archived in a read-only state. Students may be restricted from viewing concluded courses. You also may be able to manually conclude an individual course enrollment.

Unless you or your Canvas admin restrict permission to view prior courses, these courses appear in the Past Courses section of the Courses menu.

When a course is concluded, the course participation end date is automatically populated with the current date and time.

Read Only/Archived

When a course is completed and you want to provide read-only access to the course, you may be able to conclude the course manually in Canvas. This change applies to all enrollments, including course instructors. Instructor-based roles will no longer have the same access in the course and will result in loss of course functionality and user information, such as viewing SIS data. If full functionality is still required for instructors but you want to conclude the course for students, you can change the participation end date of the course. Please note that instructors can also change the course participation date for their courses.

Read only state does not happen automatically, it needs to be manually set up by an instructor or admin, this can be done in the account settings.

Student Role

Course Status

Behavior

Active*

Inactive

Concluded**

Read only

View Course in Global Navigation Courses List

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View and Access Course/Groups Content

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Participate in Course/Groups

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Message Other Users

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message instructor(s) only

View Course Grades

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*prior access may be restricted by Restrict students from viewing course before start date account/course setting.

**past access may be restricted by Restrict students from viewing course after end date account/course setting.

Instructor/Admin Roles

Course States
Behavior Active Inactive Concluded Read Only
View Names in People Page swynn_13-1656682189897.png swynn_13-1656682189897.png swynn_13-1656682189897.png swynn_13-1656682189897.png
Show Names in Messaging Lists swynn_13-1656682189897.png swynn_13-1656682189897.png
View Names/Grades in Gradebook swynn_13-1656682189897.png swynn_13-1656682189897.png swynn_13-1656682189897.png swynn_13-1656682189897.png
View/Download Assignments swynn_13-1656682189897.png swynn_13-1656682189897.png swynn_13-1656682189897.png swynn_13-1656682189897.png
Assign to Groups swynn_13-1656682189897.png
Counted in Course Analytics

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+ all statistics

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+ statistics student tab

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+ statistics student tab

View User Analytics swynn_13-1656682189897.png swynn_13-1656682189897.png
View Access Report swynn_13-1656682189897.png swynn_13-1656682189897.png swynn_13-1656682189897.png
View Status in Reports (Account Settings) swynn_13-1656682189897.png swynn_13-1656682189897.png swynn_13-1656682189897.png swynn_13-1656682189897.png

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