Options for Access and Visibility in Canvas
Do you want to control what and when your students see your content in your Canvas course site? There are quite a few options that provide for controlling the access and visibility of Quizzes, Assignments, Files, Announcements, Modules, Pages, and even your course site open and close dates.
Limiting Access and Visibility for Quizzes
Perhaps you might need to curve an exam score or don’t want your online students to receive their scores until you’ve uploaded those of the students who took paper exams. The Canvas Gradebook enables you to limit students’ access to quiz and exam scores by muting and unmuting. You can also limit whether and when students access quiz or exam questions and answers.
Canvas allows you to restrict quiz or exam access to particular students or sections via differentiated access. This option is especially helpful if you want to provide access before or after a due date, or only allow particular students to access a quiz or exam (such as for a makeup).
Having trouble getting uploaded quiz or exam scores to appear in the Gradebook? Once you’ve uploaded the scores, be sure to unmute them. Otherwise, they will only be visible to you and your TAs. And remember that assignments or quizzes that are not published will not display as columns in your Gradebook.
Limiting Access and Visibility for Assignments
While you can control student access to assignment submission via the open and close date fields in the assignment settings, Canvas provides additional options. Just like with the Quizzes tool, you can use differentiated access to restrict assignment submission (including for graded discussions) only to particular students or sections. Here are some details on how those differentiated assessments will appear on the Syllabus and Calendar tools, as well as other areas of your course site.
In addition to muting assignments via the Gradebook, you can also do so in SpeedGrader. Muting can be particularly useful if you want to limit students’ access to scores and feedback until all of your grading of a particular assignment is complete.
Limiting Access and Visibility for Files
Canvas enables you to restrict student access to particular files and folders on your course site. With this function, you can link to files — perhaps for a quiz, exam, or assignment — while restricting students from accessing them directly. Using this feature, you can either fully restrict access to files and folder, or limit students’ access to a particular window of time.
Don’t want students to be able to access the Files tool at all? You can hide the tool from students by dragging the Files tool to the bottom of the Navigation tab in the course settings.
Limiting Access and Visibility for Announcements
You can manage when students see an announcement by using the delay posting option. This function allows you to select a specific date and time in the future for an announcement to post, which can be handy when you are traveling or just want to plan ahead.
If you want to enable comments for announcements, you have a number of options. You can require students to post a response to an announcement before they can see other replies (this option is also available in Discussions) and enable them to like replies to an announcement. Finally, when you are ready to move on from an announcement, you can close it for comments.
And, if you do not want to enable comments for announcements at all, Canvas allows you to disable that function. If you have your notifications set up to send you emails, you can see student questions in your email inbox and reply directly from there. You can also reply to questions using the mobile app.
Limiting Access and Visibility in Modules
Modules offer an additional way for you to control access to and visibility of your course site’s components. You can use the Modules tool to lock a module and its contents (including pages, assignments, quizzes, and files) until a particular day and time. You can also create prerequisite modules that require students to complete a module before moving on to subsequent ones. Finally, you can add requirements to a module so that students must complete certain requirements in a module (such as achieve a certain score on a quiz or view particular course site pages) before moving on to the next ones.
Visibility of Pages and Courses
You can limit access to your course pages by publishing and unpublishing them. Students will only see published pages. You can also limit access to your entire course site through the Publish option and using the course access options. You can allow students access before the start of the term and after the term ends using the dates set in the course settings. The course must be published for students to view it and once your course site has a graded assignment, it can no longer be unpublished.
Questions about visibility or any other questions about Canvas?
Reprinted from Teach@Warrington
