How to unpublish a module and all items

[dbradbury]

Hi. I am a teacher. I see there is now an option in each Canvas module to "Unpublish module and all items", but it's almost useless because it doesn't unpublish files. Is there any way of unpublishing files too? Or would it be quicker to just delete them and re-upload?

I'm very disappointed - I really thought the "unpublish all" was the time-saving feature I had been waiting for. It seems not.

[SusanNiemeyer]

I don't use files in my Canvas course, so I haven't experimented with this. Nevertheless, all in all, the new options for publishing and unpublishing modules are a great improvement. I'm ecstatic that I can quickly publish and unpublish my modules as I wish.

No, deleting and re-uploading files would not be quicker. Unless you have a hundred plus files, you should be able to quickly unpublish them.

[dbradbury]

Hi,

Thanks for responding. For some reason, your rely has disappeared.

To answer your question about files: We use them so our students can have permanent access to the questions and their answers for future reference when they are studying at university overseas. We therefore use Word documents with fillable form fields. The students download these from Canvas, fill in their answers and save the documents locally.

Essentially we use Canvas as a file server so our students can easily locate materials. Therefore we need to unpublish them one at a time as necessary because of the ongoing shortcoming in the "unpublish module and all items " option that does not unpublish files. 

Also, our students need to submit papers and receive in-text feedback, but the "assignments" option in Canvas is just too clucky and inflexible - comments cannot be deleted, it's too fiddly downloading assignments and the inbox feature in poorly designed. We therefore use an external messaging app to receive and return these papers.

We do not use assignments or quizzes at all because of the complexity ("Choose a quiz engine" - really?), and even "attendance" is unusable because our students attend two classes per day.

[dbradbury]

Hi,

Thanks for replying, but this is not a solution. I appreciate that it is useful to be able to partly unpublish module content, but I still need to unpublish a large number of files one at a time - although this can be done by folder.

We upload large number of files because our students need a permanent record of the exercises they have completed, so we use Word documents with fillable form fields that they can save on their laptops. The "quizzes" don't meet this requirement, and "assignments" are too complicated and inflexible. We don't have the time or resources to figure out how to make these permanent - apart from screenshots...

[TrishaMeyer1]

Hi @dbradbury ,

If the entire Module is unpublished, students can't see the content even if individual items show as published (i.e. have the green check next to them). So you can just unpublish the Module and ignore the individual markings on the files.

ETA: Just make sure you disable the Files tab on the menu so that they can't access the files there.

[dbradbury]

Thanks for responding

[jhopkins1]

I am in alignment with @dbradbury regarding only partial publishing of module content. What is the point of "unpublish module and all content" if it does not do so? Before doing a course copy, I like to replace files with new assignments or updates. I can then upload the new and purge old content from the course shell if all old items are turned off. This gives me a clean course to copy to a new shell. Is there a reason that only some files turn off with this command?

[nancym]

I have the same question as @dbradbury.  The point is to unpublish the module and all files, then republish the module only and make the files available throughout the course at the appropriate time.  I do not know the exact dates that the files need to be made available, so I do not use the feature either.