Course Settings and Navigation

Course Settings vs. Canvas Settings - Keep It Clean and Simple

In the teacher view of Canvas you'll find two "Settings" menus.  One is found in the upper right hand corner of your screen next to your name, Inbox, Logout and Help.  This settings portion of Canvas will allow you to make changes to your personal account information, notifications, and contact info.  If you haven't already, take a moment to look at your personal Canvas User Settings and make sure you have connected an email address for receiving notifications and announcements.

 

You will also find on this setting page a place to connect some of your online services like Google Docs, Facebook, Twitter, and more.

The Settings menu located on the left side of your page in the course menu will provide you with the ability to make changes to the settings for just the course you are in at the time.  One thing you may want to consider is going in to the Settings menu for your course and adjusting that very menu on the left side, the Course Navigation menu.

Course Navigation

There are way too many links in this section for most students and therefore somewhat confusing.  You can easily simplify this menu by "hiding" the items you aren't using or don't want students to access.  Hiding items doesn't delete them from your course, it only removes them from that busy menu. In the image below you can see that I reordered my menu items using the drag and drop functionality and then hid items like "attendance" and "grades" which are not necessary for this particular Canvas course.

Once you have selected the links you want enabled or disabled click the blue Save button to lock in those settings. At any time you can always go back and adjust these menu selections.