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Declutter Your Canvas Course

Implement actionable strategies for decluttering your Canvas course. Removing unused files and materials allows you to focus your energy on remediating content you and your students actively use.

Why is it Important?

Why clean out your course regularly? Importing an existing Canvas course can be efficient if you’re teaching the same course semester after semester, but you may find yourself with outdated content you’ve pivoted away from using. You might know what materials are actively needed, but UDOIT and Panorama don’t. These tools scan everything in your course for accessibility—whether the content is published or unpublished, in a Module or out of a Module, old or new. Reducing your Canvas course to contain only current materials helps you receive a more accurate accessibility report.

If there’s content you want to save, build a purposeful archive of unused materials. By organizing your course more intentionally, you’re making it easier for you to check for accessibility, and easier for your students to find what they need.

Use a Canvas Development Shell

To begin your content cleanup, import your selected course into a Canvas development shell. Request a Canvas development shell through 6-TECH.

Use a Canvas development shell to review, evaluate, and remove content deliberately. Instead of rushing changes in a live course where mistakes are harder to undo, a development shell is your safe space to experiment. You can delete files, pages, and other content in your development shell without the risk of accidentally removing materials students need access to in your live course.

After checking your content for accessibility, your organized and streamlined Canvas development shell can serve as an accessible blueprint you can import into future live courses.

Review Your Course

Review your course for outdated, unused, and duplicated content. Look through Modules, Assignments, Pages, Quizzes, Discussion, Files, Announcements, and Studio.

One approach is to publish any materials you wish to preserve. Unpublish any materials you want to archive or delete. This can be a helpful visual indicator for you when organizing your content.

Delete Unused Content

When you’re ready to delete what you don’t need, go to the location of your content in Canvas (Pages, Quizzes, etc.) and delete the item there. Removing content from a Module doesn’t mean it’s gone from your Canvas course! Make sure it’s deleted from its source.

Archive Content

For saving unused content, you have options! No need to implement each of these strategies. Pick one that works for you.

Here are a few approaches you could take to archive content within Canvas:

  • Import only materials you want to use in an upcoming course into a Canvas development shell where you’ll make content accessible.
  • Create a Files folder in your course exclusively for files you want to save for later (Ex: “Archived Files”).
  • Create an unpublished module and add unpublished pages, assignments, discussions, quizzes, etc. you want to save. (Ex: “Do Not Publish–Archived Content”).

Here are a few approaches you could take to archive content using OneDrive:

  • Download files you want to preserve from Canvas and save to a folder in OneDrive.
  • Export a full copy of your Canvas course and save to a folder in OneDrive.

Additional Resources

Last Updated: December 5, 2025

How-To Guides