A quick review of our Canvas courses after some teachers reported receiving access requests for particular files referenced in their courses from individuals not associated with the district shows that there are about 950 courses that are fully publicly visible, meaning that anyone with the URL can see all of the course content without needing to log in. Since all courses default to Private (“Course”) visibility – the Course Settings would have had to manually been changed to “Public” visibility for that to be the case. Perhaps every one of those courses’ teachers want their course content to be available to anyone with the URL, but to play it safe, consider taking a moment to review those courses you’d prefer were only visible to your students to confirm their visibility setting is as you’d expect and should it not be, change it from “Public” to “Course”. Alternatively, if you’d now like to make “Public” a previously private “Course”, with a few clicks, you can make that happen.
This guide https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-customize-visibility-options-for-a-course/ta-p/844 explains the visibility options and this PDF https://s3.amazonaws.com/tr-learncanvas/docs/CanvasCourseVisibilityOptions.pdf has a helpful table with a breakdown of those visibility options.
