Instructors gain access to their future Canvas course sites in mid-October and mid-March of each academic year. Each new course site comes with our standard set of academic tools enabled, such as Canvas Modules and Zoom.
Getting Started
You will also see two links in your course navigation for Getting Started: Instructors and Getting Started: Students (See Fig. 1).
Figure 1: Getting started links in the Canvas navigation menu
The student’s page shows them how to navigate Canvas, adjust notification settings, and describes some tools they may see in their courses. We encourage you to keep this link front and center for your students.
The instructor page shows you how to update your course home page and course details so your students have everything they need in your course. It also provides checklists and contact information in case you have any questions. This link is visible to students so you may want to remove this getting started link from your course navigation menu once you’ve finished customizing your course.
Course Combo and Copy
After you’ve gotten access to your new Canvas site you may want to do a course combo to combine two cross-listed sections together. Or you may want to do a course copy to bring in a previous semester's course content from either your own course or someone else’s.
Checklists
We also recommend that you look over the start of semester and course readiness checklists. These lists will help you have a well-thought-out, prepared, and organized course site. The more we can do to ensure student success, the better!