As an admin, the Account Settings tab contains multiple settings you can control and change in your Canvas account.

Note: This lesson indicates the settings that you can manage for your entire account. Other integrations may be available with the assistance of your Customer Success Manager. For a full list of integrations available in Canvas, please view the Canvas integrations lesson.

As an Admin, you can choose to set default restrictions for student access in your institution. These restrictions include student access to courses before the start date and/or after the end date.

To manage student access, you can set the default value but allow instructors and sub-account admins to edit access for the course and sub-account levels as necessary, or you can set and lock the student access setting for the entire institution. The checkbox settings at the account level are passed to the sub-account and course levels as default values.

Restrict students from viewing course before start date: When a student enrolls in a future course, the course displays in the Future Enrollments section in the student Courses list. Once a course is published, the course displays an invitation to join the course, where the students can view course content at any time before the course begins. However, when the student restriction for the course start date is enabled, students cannot view a link to the course until the start date, even if the course is published.

Restrict students from viewing future courses in enrollments list: When a student enrolls in a future course, the course displays in the Future Enrollments section in the student Courses list. However, when the view courses before the start date restriction is enabled, a second option is displayed to completely remove the future enrollment from the Courses list. This setting can also be enabled to keep students from knowing they are enrolled in a course with a future start date.

Restrict students from viewing course after end date: Once a course has concluded, students can still view the course but all content is displayed in a read-only state. However, when the student restriction for the course end date is enabled, students can no longer view the course in the Courses list after the course has concluded. This setting can be used if your institution uses the course across multiple terms and want to restrict students from accessing prior content for future students, or if students have to re-enroll in the course.

These restriction settings also apply to the override start and end dates for the course. If no override dates are specified, the start and end dates apply to the term dates. Learn more about term and course dates in Canvas.

You can add new users to your account. Users can only be added at the account level.

If you use SIS Imports, you do not need to add any users to your account, as they can be added through your student information system (SIS).

Account Invitations

When a user account is manually added, Canvas gives an option to generate an account invitation. If this invitation is sent, the user is invited to complete the registration process by creating a password. Once the user has an account, the user can also be added to a course. If a user is invited to a course without having an account, the user will have to create an account before accepting the course invitation.

When users are invited to a course manually, they can view the course invitation link in their email and click it to view a preview of the Canvas course. To officially accept, they must click an Accept button in the Canvas interface. However, if you prefer to disable course previews and have users automatically join the course when they view the Canvas course, please contact your Customer Success Manager to disable invitation previews.

Email Addresses

Canvas identifies users by email address. When students are added to a course, Canvas attempts to reconcile any email address conflicts when the user first logs in to the course:

• If the user does not have a username in the course's root account, the user's email address is linked to another user within the account, or the institution does not use delegated authentication if open registration is enabled, an account will be created for the user. Adding an email address that is not already linked to an account will only work if Open Registration is enabled.
• If the email address is already associated with an account, the student will be asked to log in to Canvas using his or her existing email address.
• Sometimes a student may be using multiple email addresses within Canvas. If a student responds to an account invitation at one email address, but is logged in to Canvas using a different email address, the student will be asked if they want to link both addresses to the same account. 

If usage rights is enabled in your course, you can set usage rights for all files that currently exist within the folder. Folders themselves cannot hold a usage right attribute, so the folder passes the usage right to the existing files in the folder at the time the usage right was defined. Therefore, you can create a folder, add all files to the folder, and then define the usage right for the folder and apply the right to all files at once.

This action does not apply to any files added to the folder after the usage right is set. If additional files are added at a later time, you will have to reset the usage right for the folder or set file usage rights individually.

Note: Usage Rights is currently a course opt-in feature. To enable usage rights, learn how to manage feature options in the course features lesson.