Unpublished courses are courses in preparation; they are courses being authored by instructors. While a course is unpublished, students cannot access or participate in the course. Students can see their future enrollments in the Future Enrollments section of the Courses menu in the Global Navigation Menu. When the course material is deemed ready by the instructor, it may be published with the click of a button. If a course is never published, the course will remain in the students' Future Enrollments section.
Published courses are instantly available to students if the semester has started. When published, activity is dictated by the dates and status of course assignments and modules. Individual assignments, modules, or other course content can be individually locked (made unavailable to students) or assigned a date in the future, prior to which students will not be able to see or participate in said course component. These courses will appear in the My Courses section of the Courses menu in the Global Navigation Menu.
Concluded courses are courses that are completed according to the semester (term) dates, or courses that have been manually marked complete by an instructor. This is the archived state of the course. These courses will appear in the Past Courses section of the Courses menu in the Global Navigation Menu. A concluded course is a course that ends by the assigned term dates and becomes a read-only archive of the course for both students and instructors.
NOTE: Instructors won’t have to worry about concluding a course since the end date of the semester will automatically conclude the course on your behalf.
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Sometimes instructors or administrators need to give students access to a concluded course. Remember, there are two types of dates for courses in Canvas. Semester (Term) dates (set by administrators) and course dates (set by instructors that will override the term dates. There should be no reason to manually conclude a course at the end of the term if the term dates are set correctly and effectively. If a situation arises where a course must be concluded earlier than the end term date, instructors can change the end course date in Settings. An instructor can also change the start date of the course by clicking on the course Settings and then Course Details to find both the course start and end dates.