Canvas courses have three essential states: unpublished, published, and concluded.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Unpublished
Unpublished courses are courses in preparation; they are courses being authored by instructors, instructional designers, and administrators. While a course is unpublished, students cannot access or participate in the course.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.
When viewing courses, students can view unpublished courses that haven't begun yet in the Future Enrollments section of the Courses menu.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, students who are viewing their courses can view published courses 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
By End Date or Term
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, students who are viewing their courses can view concluded courses 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.
Manually
When a course is completed and you want to provide read-only access to the course, you may be able to manually conclude the course 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 in Account Settings.
Student Role
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Course Status |
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Behavior |
Active* |
Inactive |
Concluded - by End Date or Term** |
Concluded - Manually |
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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 |
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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 - by End Date or Term | Concluded - Manually |
| View Names in People Page | |
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| Show Names in Messaging Lists | |
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| View Names/Grades in Gradebook | |
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| View/Download Assignments | |
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| Assign to Groups | |
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| Counted in Course Analytics |
+ all statistics |
+ statistics student tab |
+ statistics student tab |
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| View User Analytics | |
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| View Access Report | |
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| View Status in Reports (Account Settings) | |
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