Canvas Guides

How do I use the Course Navigation Menu as an instructor?

The Course Navigation Menu is a series of links on the left side of your course that help you and your students access different course areas. The Course Navigation Menu is visible by default, but you can choose to collapse it.

Depending on the structure of your course, you can choose to reorder and hide course navigation links.

Note: If you have enabled the Canvas Elementary Theme for your course, the Course Navigation Menu displays a different font.

Open Course

To open a course from the Global Navigation Menu, click the Courses link [1]. Then click a course link [2], or to view all courses, click the All Courses link [3].

View Course Navigation Menu

View the Course Navigation Menu [1]. The currently active link is highlighted with different color text and a line indicator [2]. This highlight helps you quickly identify the feature area you are currently viewing in Canvas.

Links that are hidden to students are indicated by the Visibility icon [3]. A link may be hidden to students because the feature area has no content or because the link is disabled. Learn more about managing course navigation links.

By default, new courses show links leading to the index pages for the following areas:

Home
Announcements
Assignments
Discussions
Grades
People
Pages
Files
Syllabus
Outcomes
Quizzes
Modules
Conferences
Collaborations
Settings
Lucid (Whiteboard)

Note: Configured external (LTI ) tools may create additional Course Navigation links. However, these links do not display the visibility icon. To prevent a link for an LTI tool displaying in the Course Navigation Menu for either you or your students, you can disable Course Navigation links for LTI Tools in course settings.