As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, your Canvas account will fall under the umbrella of an institutional Canvas account or a Free for Teachers account. Creating a course is different for both types of accounts, and you may find that your specific institution's Canvas situation might be a hybrid of both, depending on how your school has chosen to integrate Canvas with its other systems. To begin, let's start with how to access your new blank course if it has been set up by your institution's IT or other administrative department.
If your school uses Canvas as its LMS, you will mostly likely not need to deal with the initial creation of your Canvas course. In fact, you may not have the ability to create your own Canvas course; in this case, you will need to go through your IT or administrative department to create a course within your institution's Canvas site. Often, the IT or administrative department will have all of your courses created automatically when they create the course within the institutional course registration system.
When courses are created automatically, you will often also be automatically added to those courses, at which point they will appear when you log in to Canvas without any action on your part. Alternately, if your IT team manually creates your course, you will receive an e-mail inviting you to officially join the course. After the IT or administrative teams have created your course, you will receive an e-mail that informs you that you have been invited to participate in your course as a teacher. The following screenshot is a sample of what the e-mail may contain:
From there, you should follow the link in the main body of the e-mail:
You will be directed to the Canvas login page for your institution, where you should log in using your institutional username and password or the username and password you set up with your IT or other administrative department.
Once you log in, your dashboard should include Decline or Accept buttons to decline or accept the course invitation. Once you click on Accept, the course will show up on the top-left menu under the Courses link.
From there, you can click on Courses, select the course you have just joined, and begin the course building process that we will cover in Chapter 2, Building Your Canvas Course.
If you are not using Canvas through an institution, you will need to create a course using your Free for Teachers account.
If you are using the Free for Teachers version of Canvas, you can create a new course from your dashboard. For institutional account users, you may also have this option depending on how your IT team has configured Canvas. To create a new course, perform the following steps:
Navigate to your Canvas dashboard.
On the right-side menu, click on the button that says Start a New Course.
From there, a pop-up window will appear within your browser. In that window, you can name your course, assign an abbreviation and course number, select the content license from a drop-down menu, and choose whether you would like the course to be publicly accessible. In most cases, you will probably want to keep your course private, but you may choose whichever option is most applicable to your unique course situation.
Once you have entered all the information for your course, click on Create course.
The following screenshot shows you how the pop-up window will look like and offers examples of what you might want to include when setting up your course:
Your course is now created! After you click on Create course, you will be taken to the home page of your new course. You'll notice that the course layout is similar to what we saw while editing your account settings. We will go over how to navigate your course in more detail throughout the rest of the book, but you should see that:
The top-right menu is still visible and unchanged
The top-left menu is still visible and unchanged
The left-side menu lists specific locations and options within the course
The center of the screen displays the main content of the course home page
The right-side menu displays the Coming Up section along with the option to post a new announcement
The bottom menu is still visible and unchanged
Also, note that a course checklist hovers at the bottom of the screen. This checklist will walk you through the various steps in adding content to and publishing your course.
When you create your course, it will remain unpublished until you choose to publish it. Until your course is published, only teachers, designers, and teacher's assistants (TAs) that have been added to the course will be able to access the course content. Once the course is published, students you have added to the course will be able to access the course content. You will see the message displayed in the following screenshot when your course is unpublished:
Depending on how you would like your course to run, it is up to you when you decide to officially publish your course and allow all participants to access the content. In later chapters, we will cover how to control exactly what participants can see within your course once it is published, but at this point it is probably best to wait until you have finished designing your course before officially publishing it.
Now that we have created your first course, we can begin building the course by adding and organizing content in the coming chapters.