Posting Your Syllabus in Canvas

The Canvas Syllabus tool is a useful way to articulate your course objectives, structure, and expectations to prospective students during enrollment and students enrolled throughout the semester. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate three ways you may want to add your course syllabus content to Canvas.

When you post your syllabus and publish your course in Canvas, your syllabus will become available in the Yale's Course Search. It may take up to 6 hours for your syllabus to appear in Course Search.

Table of Contents

This article will address the following information:

Copying and Pasting Content

  1. Click Syllabus in the course navigation.
  2. To edit the syllabus, click the Edit button.
  1. You can copy content from Word documents directly into the Rich Content Editor or create original content inside of the Rich Content Editor.
  1. When done, click Update Syllabus.

To insert a link to the syllabus file, click edit on the Syllabus page.

  1. Find the File icon in the Rich Content Editor (RCE).
  2. 3. Choose Course Documents if you have already uploaded the syllabus file to the Files section of Canvas.
  1. From the sidebar that opens on the right-hand side, find your syllabus file and click it in order for it to be added to the syllabus page as a link.
  1. When done, click Update Syllabus.

Uploading a New Course File

  1. To insert a link to a Syllabus document that you do not already have uploaded into your Files area, click the File icon in the Rich Content Editor ribbon.
  2. Choose Upload Document.
  1. You can either drag and drop your syllabus file, or browse your computer to select your document.
  2. Once you have selected your file, click the Submit button to see the file appear in the editor.
image of drag and drap to upload a file
  1. When done, click Update Syllabus.

For more information about the Syllabus tool:

To learn more on how to write an effective syllabus:

For more help, please contact canvas@yale.edu.