What is the Canvas "Student View"?

Teachers should use the Student View in their Canvas courses to confirm how the course looks to students.

At minimum, review your course with the Student View before you publish it. Also, if you add new assignments, modules, or quizzes to your course during the semester, review them with the Student View before publishing each one.

More importantly, you can use this tool to confirm if your course is working as you expect, fix any issues, and better understand student questions and concerns.

How do I use it in my course?

To activate the Student View in a Canvas course, click the View as Student button, usually located on the top-right of the page in your browser. For more information about how to access the Student View, visit the Canvas Instructor guide linked below.

Canvas Instructor Guide: How do I view a course as a test student using Student View?

Common Student Issues You Can Troubleshoot with Student View

"I don't see that item in the module."

You can check whether or not students can see and can access an assignment, page, module, or media item using Student View.

Activate Student View, then look for the item where you put it in the course. If you can't see it using the Student View, that means students can't either. Check to make sure you've published it. This is the most common reason an instructor can access course content, but students in the course can't.

For example, in the screenshot below, the instructor can see a module in their normal view. The assignments are published, but the module is not. When they activate Student View, they no longer see the module on their homepage, which means students in the course can't see it either.

"I can't open that item—it's grayed out."

Even if students can see the item, that doesn't mean they can open it. Once in Student View, click the item to make sure students can access it.

"I see that quiz, but I can't start an attempt."

You can also use Student View to check date restrictions for assignments by viewing assignments in student view.

How do I fix it?

Make sure that all items you want students to access are published and have the correct access dates. Confirm with student view.

You can also use this feature to see which items appear for students in their course navigation menu. The navigation menu is more limited for students as they do not need access to many features that instructors commonly use in Canvas. You can make some changes to how the navigation menu appears for students.

"Where do I submit my assignments? I see multiple places to submit the same assignment."

What is happening?

Even if a module only appears once on the homepage, it is possible that there are multiple versions of the assignment that students may have access to in the course.

For example, in the screenshot below there is only one module on the home page, but if you look at the "To Do" list on the right side of the screen, you can see different versions of the same assignment with different due dates.

To confirm duplicate assignments, click Assignments in the navigation bar. If students have access to duplicate assignments, you will see the same assignment more than once in the list.

Notice in the screenshot below, there are two versions of each assignment with different due dates.

How did this happen?

When you copy all the content from multiple different versions of a course into a course shell, it will create duplicates.

How do I fix it?

If students have not yet submitted work, unpublish and delete all the duplicates leaving only one version.

For example, in the screenshot below you can see both sets of assignments by navigating to the assignment tab after leaving student view. In this case, I would keep the assignments that are in the "Duplicates" module on the homepage and unpublish and delete the other version.

If students have submitted work, reach out to the Canvas Team by emailing canvas@uwsuper.edu. for support as quickly as possible.