How to Manage Your Course Settings

Introduction

Settings is a navigational tab in your course where you can customize many settings. Five tabs within Settings unlock keys to your course options.

Tutorial

319 - Course Settings Overview from the Instructure Canvas Community

You can control all of these settings in your course:

• Course Details Tab
  • Show recent announcements on Course home page: Allows you to enable this feature, along with how many announcements to show (up to 15)
  • Let students attach files to Discussions: Can be enabled/disabled here
  • Let students edit/delete Discussion posts: Can be enabled/disabled here
  • Disable comments on Announcements: Can be enabled/disabled here 
• Sections
  • Depending on your institution's Canvas settings, you may have the ability to create new sections and/or crosslist courses into sections in one course
• Navigation
  • Instructors have the ability to determine which areas in their courses are available to students by customizing the Course Navigation, making the student experience cleaner and more streamlined
• Apps
  • Depending on your institution's Canvas settings, you may have the ability to add Apps, also called External Tools or LTIs
• Feature Options
  • Additional opt-in Canvas feature options can be enabled here for your course

A few more things to consider about Settings are below:

• Depending on your institution's Canvas settings, you may have the ability to enable a self-enroll option for your course; this creates an enroll code and generates a specific url that can be shared with people you wish to invite to your course
• Setting a language for your course can also be enabled here; whatever language you select will flow down to all enrolled in the course

Accessibility

One way to help people with disabilities, and anyone new to Canvas, is to limit the navigation links (that list on the left of the screen) to the ones that are used in the course. Depending on how you arrange your class, you may opt to hide many of the buttons or re-order them so that the most important buttons come first. 

This benefits people with disabilities in that it involves fewer items to choose from and directs them to the most important parts of the course. For someone using a screen reader, they may have to listen to a list of links before hearing the one that they need. Removing unnecessary links and ordering them in terms of priority will help them navigate in a more efficient manner. 

Instructions for reordering or hiding Course Navigation links. 

More Info

Need more information? Check out this Canvas Guide!

• How do I use Course Settings