To begin building your Canvas course, adjust the course settings to meet your instructional needs. On this page, we highlight the most important settings to customize in order to make your site user-friendly and easy to navigate.
Course Navigation
Within a Canvas site, you and your students will use your course navigation menu on the left side to browse the site. We recommend adjusting the appearance of the course navigation to show only the tools your students will need. You can change the navigation menu anytime as you develop your site.
If the navigation menu ever disappears, bring it back by clicking on the three lines in the top left corner to show/hide the course navigation menu.
Editing navigation menu items
Follow the directions in Enabling an Existing Tool to find and edit your course navigation menu items. Menu items with a crossed-out eyeball will not appear for students, but instructors and TAs can see them.
We highly recommend hiding navigation items you are not using or don’t want students to access, especially the Files item. This section can become disorganized quickly and pose a security risk if instructor-only files are inadvertently published.
Course Details
Course image
Adding a course image can help students quickly identify your course on their Dashboard.
- Click Settings and select the tab for Course Details.
- Click Choose Image next to Image and upload a file.
- Accepted image types include JPG, JPEG, GIF, and PNG. Images should be approximately 262 pixels wide by 146 pixels high.
- You can switch the photo later by hovering over the square, clicking the three dots, and selecting Choose Image.
Each user can select their own color overlay and course nickname to display on their Canvas Dashboard, but the image will remain visible.
Participation
On the Settings > Course Details screen, locate Participation. The participation setting determines when your Canvas course is available to students.
We highly recommend keeping the default setting of Term for Penn courses to align your course with Penn’s Fall, Spring, and Summer term dates.
After the course end date, students can still access the course in a read-only state, but they cannot submit work. Contact Canvas Support if you need to reopen your course for unique cases, such as for students taking an Incomplete.
You may prefer to change the participation setting to Course. That allows you to set custom start and end dates for your course. However, if an end date isn’t specified, your course will remain open to students indefinitely.
You can also use the checkboxes to further restrict students from accessing your course before it starts or after it ends, which may be helpful to shield course content that you plan to reuse.
Click the Update Course Details button at the bottom to save any changes. For more information, see Canvas Terms.
Other settings
On the Course Details tab, you also have the option to add a grading scheme. You can select the default Canvas grading scheme or, if it exists, a departmental-based grading scheme. You may also create your own grading scheme to match your syllabus.
At the bottom of Course Details is a description box with more options. By clicking this box, you can adjust:
- The appearance of recent announcements
- Various discussion board options
- Hiding total scores or grade distribution graphs
Additional Resources
Getting Help
Please contact your Local Support Provider or submit a request to canvas@pobox.upenn.edu.