The public course index is a collection of all courses that can be viewed publicly within your institution. In relation to the index, the word public references the index, not the courses; courses in the index may be public or private courses. Learn how to view the Public Course Index.

If you want to include your course as part of the public course index, you can select the course index visibility option in course settings. You can also create a description for your course as part of the catalog listing.

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

Notes:

• The Public Course Index is currently an account opt-in feature and must be enabled by your institutional admin.
• If your course is enabled for self-enrollment, you can add a Join button to allow users to self-enroll at any time.

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.

After you have created an account-level role, you can review the default permissions set by each account-level role. Permissions grant or deny access to specific features within an account and course and are applied to any user granted a specific account-level role. Learn how to add an administrative user to an account.

Depending on the role, you may want to override the defaults to create custom permissions.

To learn more about account permissions, view the Account Permissions PDF.

As an instructor, after you have created a page for your course, you can edit the page at any time.

By default, only instructors (teachers) can edit pages. However, you can set a default preference for specific users to edit and contribute to the page in the Course Settings Course Details tab.