By:  Katie Earehart     

How-To: Enable Course Navigation Items in Canvas 

As an instructor you may spend hours preparing your Canvas course(s) each semester: uploading and organizing content, setting up the Gradebook, scheduling class meetings, etc. With all of that hard work each term, it’s important your students are able to easily access and navigate your material. Whether synchronous or asynchronous, navigation best practices for online learning suggest utilizing a clean, consistent approach to course navigation that promotes using fewer navigation links with greater relevancy.

Based on your course delivery or course organization, you may want to enable or disable navigation links for your Canvas course. Canvas includes a set of default links that may be customized based on your display and course management preferences. Configured external (LTI) tools and applications, e.g. Zoom, WebEx, Google Drive, etc., can create additional links that may be enabled for use or hidden from view based on your desired user experience.

Whether you are enabling a link for a specific application or curating your links for more effective course management, customizing the Canvas Course Navigation Menu can be accomplished with just a few clicks!

Note: Disabling a course navigation link can create page redirects, hide tabs in the Rich Content Editor, and/or affect the Dashboard course view. More information on the effects of reordering and disabling links, including written set-by-step instructions on how to edit navigation links, can be found in this Canvas Guide.

Step-by-Step Instructions

A Canvas user guide for managing navigation links is available if you’d prefer written step-by-step instructions.

You can also review the video below for a guided experience on how to enable, hide, and reorganize course navigation links in Canvas: