Canvas @ Yale

Unlocking Courses in Past Terms to Add Users

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If you need to add a user to a past course, you can temporarily unlock your course so you can add them. When you manually add the user, they will receive an email invitation to your old course site.

The Unlock Tool temporarily unlocks your course for ONE WEEK. After the week has past, the course will go back to the past courses. You can unlock/re-lock a course as many times as needed.

If the course re-locks before the user accepts the invitation, they will not have access to your course because their enrollment is not complete. The user must accept the invitation before you re-lock.

Table of Contents

This article will address the following information:

Unlocking Your Past Course

  1. To access your past course, click on "Courses" from the global navigation.
  2. From the side menu that appears, click "All Courses."
  1. Under the "Past Enrollments" section, click on the course you want to unlock.
Click on the course you want to unlock
  1. Once you are in the course, go to "Settings."
  2. Click on the "Unlock Course" button on the right-hand side to unlock the course.

The Lock / Unlock Tool will only appear in courses that are concluded, or in a term that is no longer active. 

  1. After you click on the unlock button, you will see a circle progress bar until the course is fully unlocked.

Once the course is fully unlocked, you can begin to add users to your course as needed.

Locking Your Past Course

If all users have accepted the invitation to your past course, you can manually re-lock the course.

Reminder: Newly added users must accept the course invitation before the course is re-locked. Your course will automatically re-lock ONE WEEK from the date that you unlock it. You can just leave the course alone and it will re-lock in one week.

  1. Click on "Settings" in the course navigation.
  2. Click the "Lock Course" button to manually lock the course.

For more help, please contact [email protected].

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