Global announcements allows you to contact all or specific users within an account or subaccount using one message. For example, if there will be a time period of updating or downtime for the account, you may want to let the users know ahead of time so they can plan accordingly.

Global announcements are shown to a user from all their associated accounts. If a user has an account with multiple institutions, the user can view multiple announcements. To help differentiate announcements at the account and subaccount levels, the message also indicates which account or subaccount sent the global announcement.

You can create five different types of announcements: warning, error, information, question, or calendar. When a new global announcement is created, information will display as the default announcement type. To learn more about the announcement types and how they appear to users, view the Global Announcement Types PDF.

Global announcements can be shown during a specific date range. Once an announcement passes its start date, the announcement is immediately visible in each user's dashboard and can be dismissed by the user.

If necessary, you can also edit the text in a global announcement, such as to fix spelling errors. The start and end dates can also be edited until the actual start or end date for the announcement.

Notes:

• Global announcements do not appear in course announcements.
• When users are not enrolled in any courses, they can view announcements from the root account. They can only view sub-account announcements once they have been added to a course within the sub-account.
• The Theme Editor primary color is associated with information, question, and calendar notifications. However, warning and error colors cannot be changed.
• Any edits made to an existing Global Announcement after its start date will not force the message to reappear for users who have already dismissed it. Any substantial changes to the global announcement should be created as a new Global Announcement so that it reappears for all users.
• Global announcements do not appear in the Canvas iOS app.

As an instructor, you may be able to change restrictions for student access in your course. These restrictions include student access to courses before or after the start and end date.

Please be aware that the settings for student access are already set by your institutional admin. If settings are available to you, you can modify them for your course. If settings are locked, you cannot change the settings for your course.

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 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 how to change course start and end dates.

Note: Restricting student access does not apply to users who do not have course enrollments and are accessing the course through Public or Institution visibility options.

Course visibility options can be customized and allow access to different user roles. The visibility setting offers three choices for a course:

• ‪Course: The course is available to all users associated (enrolled) in the course. This option is the default setting.‬

• ‪Institution: The course is available to users associated with this institution. This option allows users in your institution to view your course before they enroll in the course. For this option, users can only view the course if they are given the link to the URL or the course is included in the Public Course Index.‬
 The course content shown to authenticated users is the same content shown to the public for publicly visible courses.
• ‪Public: The course is available to anyone with the URL. If a public course is unaccessible to unauthenticated users, your institution may require a login and password to view all courses within their Canvas instance.

As part of course visibility, you can also customize content visibility.

To learn more about visibility options, view the Canvas Course Visibility Options PDF.

You can create course-level roles in Canvas. Course roles are granted to each Canvas user and define the type of access each user has in the course. Default roles include student, teacher (instructor), teacher assistant (TA), designer, and observer, but you can also create custom course-level roles depending on the needs of your institution.

Once a role is created, you can set course-level permissions.

Note: When a user receives an enrollment invitation for a course role, the invitation displays the name of the base role.

You can create rubrics for instructors to use across your institution. Instructors can add account-level rubrics to their assignments, graded discussions, and quizzes. Instructors can also create their own rubrics in their courses.