Can't edit homepage on existing courses

[rogers_angela]

I can't get any of my courses to be editable. I'm in the middle of the canvas training and can't move on until I do something to the homepage, but none of my existing classes will let me edit anything.

[James · Accepted solution]

 @rogers_angela  

You said existing class, but didn't mention whether they were active courses. If your school is using terms and the term is over, then the teacher's access can go into read-only mode. They can see what was in the course, they can check grades, they can copy the content to use in another course, but they cannot edit anything. If you were previously able to edit things and the course is over, this is the most likely reason why you cannot now. You should not modify old courses as they preserve a record of the way things were. There are reasons for not making changes to an active course as well. 

If you are doing Canvas training, you really should be doing it on a sandbox course. A sandbox course is course set up so that you can play with things without interfering with actual learning. If the students are used to one thing and you all of a sudden change it on them, that can be confusing. Your institution may want to create the sandbox course for you. In fact, as part of our teacher training, we make them build a course in a sandbox before we ever give them access to the real course that will hold students. There may be a "Start a New Course" button on your Canvas Dashboard, but I would check with the training course or its instructor to see about a sandbox course before using that button.

There are other reasons why you cannot change an existing live course, depending how your institution has things set up. Some schools have instructional designers that design the course and then the teachers teach it and they want that separation between the two. The teachers do not have permissions to modify the course. Another possibility is something called a Blueprint course. A blueprint course is a master course that acts as a template to define the assignments, their settings, and the appearance of the course. There are no students enrolled in the blueprint master course. There are courses created that are associated with the blueprint course and depending on the settings, they can be locked down so that the teacher of the course cannot change things.

[khoke]

Thanks! This is good to know. I would like to be able to view the source code for an old Canvas course page, which is only available from the Edit feature, but I guess the forced workaround is to copy the page to my Sandbox course (or another active course), then do things there. I would gripe about this, but I am becoming accustomed to an awkward workflow in Canvas.

[thomas_schellho]

Agreed --- currently very annoyed that I can't access the html for pages *I created* in closed Canvas courses without importing the page to a new shell, copying the code there, then deleting it. They could at least have a read-only view of the html code available for development purposes.