When you are ready to make your course available to your students, you will need to publish the course.

This is done quickly and easily by selecting the "Publish" button on the homepage of the course.

Canvas publish button

Some things to consider when publishing your course.

In addition to publishing a course, all of the content within the course has a Publish feature: pages, assignments, quizzes, discussions, modules, images, etc. So, a course can be published, but any given individual item may not be published.
It is not necessary to wait until your entire course is completely, finally built before publishing. Many instructors publish their course with only a percentage of the early material completed. Their intentions being to continue developing content, and publishing that content as the semester progresses.
Once a course is published, it can be unpublished, up until any one student has submitted any content to the course -- be that, completing an assignment, taking a quiz, or commenting on a discussion, or other similar actions.
Once a course is published, students will immediately have access to view course content, regardless of the start date for the semester.

For more information about publishing courses, reference these Canvas Guides.

Technical Support & Consultation Requests
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Additional Resources Online
Learn@UW Website with Guides & More Information • at.doit.wisc.edu/learn-uw
Learn@UW KnowledgeBase • kb.wisc.edu/luwmad