We put a lot of information in the Files section of our canvas courses we do not want the students to see, at least not until we are ready to put the content in front of them as the course progresses, and maybe not at all. Some of these files are for instructors only. Unfortunately, it is easy to leave the content open to students without meaning to. There are two basic ways of preventing this. We will show you both ways and why you might want to use one over the other.

Hide the File Menu item.

The left-hand course navigation menu has Files enabled as the default. If you don’t want students to have access to any of the files unless they are published in the modules section we strongly recommend you change this.

Leaving the Files menu item enabled gives your students access to all the course files at any time. An earlier tip - Customizing You Canvas Course Navigation Menu tells you how to make such changes. We also suggest that you hide the Pages menu item as well so students cannot access individual pages before you are ready for them to.

Hide the individual files and folders.

If you want students to have access to some files in the Files section, but not others it is possible to hide individual files or entire folders while leaving other visible to students.

file list.jpg

There are times you may want the students to have limited access to the Files section of your course, such as when you are sharing data files for analysis or other collection of information you do not want to lay out on a page. We recommend you build a folder structure that allows you to hide or reveal information to students at the folder level.

In your Files list click on the View/Publish icon. That will bring up a menu with four choices.

Publish – makes the file available to anyone.

Unpublish – prevents anyone but the instructors from accessing

Only available to students with link – should be used for files you are linking to or using on published pages. Students will be able to see the information on those pages but not in the Files section.

Schedule student availability – allows you to set a specific date where students will be able to access the information.

Using these tools gives you a great deal of granularity in the control of access to information.