Canvas: Files

What do they do?

Files Links to an external site. allows you to share, store and organize all sorts of files within your Canvas course. By uploading files, they become available to any students enrolled in the course. This is a great way to share your PowerPoint presentations, .pdf files, videos clips, audio files, or any file that you choose to use within your course.

The Files tool in Canvas appears and behaves like most any other file management interface. You can upload files, and organize them into folders and subfolders.
Canvas files screen

How do I ...?

Refer to this Canvas Guide Links to an external site. to learn how files can be used in a course.

Best Practices

Upload images that you intend to use in your quizzes.
Create folders to sort and organize you files and images.
Note: Your Canvas course shell has a storage capacity of 1GB. If you intend to upload and share several videos, or PowerPoint files with lots of high-resolution images, you will quickly exhaust that 1GB capacity. In that case, you will need to employ one of your external file storage repositories. As a member of the UW-Madison community, you have access to virtually unlimited space in three separate cloud-based repositories. These three spaces are:

- Google Drive (storage of all file types)
- Box (storage of all file types)
- Kaltura Mediaspace (delivery of media files)

Example Use Case

An instructor uses PowerPoint in her weekly lectures. She wishes to share these presentations with her class.

Here's how to do it:

Go to your course and click on Files.
Click the "Upload" button.
In the file-management dialog box, locate the PowerPoint file to be shared.
Select that file, and click the "Open" button.
If desired, create a folder with the "+ Folder" button.
If desired, click-and-drag the uploaded PowerPoint file into the folder.
If desired, add the file to a module Links to an external site., or to a page Links to an external site..