Canvas: Request a Course Site

Course Site Types

Academic sites are automatically generated prior to the start of each term and will appear on your Canvas Dashboard (https://canvas.umn.edu). Beginning of auto-enrollment for Fall and Spring semesters is later than the auto-creation dates. For more information, see Understand When Academic Course Sites are Available for the Upcoming Semester.
If you are an instructor and you don't see an academic site on your Canvas Dashboard, reach out to your local Department/PeopleSoft scheduler to ensure that your role and course association are accurate in PeopleSoft.
Instructors who want a sandbox Canvas site to draft course materials and/or play around with Canvas features before adding them to an academic site can request a Non-academic (non-PeopleSoft). Follow the instructions for Standard sites.

If you are a Training Hub administrator, only use the instructions below to create development sites.
- Development sites: While you are working on building a new course site, good practice is to use a development site. Request a development site using the process for requesting non-academic sites below.
- Production Training Hub Canvas sites: Once your course site is ready for learners, you'll copy the development site into a production site. Create the production site directly through Training Hub. Do not use the process below.
Get more information about Training Hub.
- Learn how to copy content from a Canvas development site to a production site.
- Learn how to create a Canvas production site through Training Hub.

Standard sites
- Standard sites are for non-academic uses, including development/sandbox, training, collaboration, and for courses/conferences that do not bear formal academic credit.
Destiny One sites
- Destiny One is used for training and in some cases, especially conferences, the LMS course is a repository of information made available to registrants and provides a collaboration mechanism.
Request Standard or Destiny One sites using the Course Request tool in Canvas Help.

Log into canvas.umn.edu
Select Help in the global navigation menu on the left.
Select Course Request (Non-academic) to launch the course request tool.
Canvas Course Request may request access to your account. Verify your name and email address and select Authorize.
Select Standard or Destiny One.
Enter a Course name and Short name.
Select an Institution/Primary Account from the menu.
Your options for College/Secondary Account or College/Program Office will vary depending on your choice of institution. Some College choices (e.g. CSOM) will bring up a Department/tertiary account or Department/Costing Unit option. Be sure to select all required options.

NOTE: As the Canvas course site requester, you are automatically assigned the role of Teacher, even if you are a Designer. This provides you with the best possible permission set while creating the course. As a Designer/Requester, please enroll yourself as a Teacher in this step. You will be able to add your Designer role and remove your Teacher role from the Canvas roster.
You can add additional users to your site now by selecting Add role and entering UMN email addresses. Multiple users can either be entered on a new line or be separated by a space, comma, semi-colon, or colon.
Select Make Request on the lower right to complete the course site request. A site will immediately be generated.

You will see Your course was successfully created and can be accessed here: with the URL of your site.
The site will also appear on your Canvas Dashboard.

November 30, 2022

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