When you are ready for your students to access your course content, you are ready to publish your course.

👉 Heads Up!

You must publish a course before students can access it and its contents. Students cannot see unpublished courses and content.
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.
Course invitations will not be sent until after the course start date. The start date is commonly the term date, unless the term is being overridden by a specific course or section date in Course Settings.

Quick Start: Publish Your Course

Go to the desired course and from the Course Home Page, click on the Publish icon on the right navigation under Course Status. (Note: On smaller screens, the Sidebar displays beneath Course Home Page content.)

publish course button

A message will appear at the top of your screen confirming the publishing of your course.

Unpublish Your Course

If you need to unpublish your course, click the Unpublish button in the right sidebar.

Students who already received course invitations will not be able to access your course.
Once your course contains a graded submission, you can no longer unpublish your course.

unpublish course button

In addition to publishing an entire course, every type of content that you create will give you the option of publishing or unpublishing that content. A published, or visible, item will have a green circle with a check mark. An unpublished, or hidden, item will have a gray circle with a line through it.

To publish specific content (e.g. an assignment, a file, a page, etc.), click on the circle icon to turn it green.

To unpublish it, click on the circle icon to turn it gray.

🤿 Deeper Dive Guide