Share Content With Other Instructors

Last updated on May 21, 2024

Building a full course from scratch can be quite an undertaking in terms of both time and effort. Converting Open Education Resources (OER), building pages, and writing quizzes and assignments are an investment in time and resources that may compete with other priorities (such as interacting with your students). This can be a lot to take on individually.

However, teaching should never feel isolating. So, this is where we can turn to our peers for help and support. Many of us teach the same (or similar) content, and have knowledgeable peers in our fields that may be willing to share content and resources. Thankfully, Canvas acknowledges the need for collaboration in education, and provides you with a few quick easy ways of sharing content.

Canvas has content sharing tools built in that allow you to send and receive completed pages, discussions, quizzes, assignments, and even entire modules. The following tutorial demonstrates the easiest ways to share content and provides some tips and techniques for when and why you might want to share content with another instructor.

Best practices

• You can share individual pages, assignments, discussions, and quizzes, or you can send entire modules at once. You can even share an entire course with another instructor! 
• Be sure to check the copyright and accessibility of all content before you share it to ensure it’s usable in a course.
• Be sure to distinguish between “copy to” and “send to.” The former is used for duplicating and reusing items in your courses, while the latter is meant to send content to other instructors.
• Make sure to only share with MSU email addresses as outside email addresses will be unable to view the content.

There is a lot of nuance associated with sharing materials in Canvas courses, so we invite you to take a deeper dive by reviewing the following presentation.

Let’s walk through it together

Sending Items

1. Go to MSU Denver’s Faculty and Staff Hub.
2. Click Canvas in the Teaching & Learning section.
3. Log in to your Canvas Account.
4. Select the Course you’d like to work in.
5. Select Modules from the course navigation menu on the left.
6. Scroll to the Module you’d like to share or the module containing the item you’d like to share.
7. Click the 3 dots (more options) icon to the right of the item you’d like to share.
8. Click Send to from the resulting dropdown menu.
9. Type the MSU Denver email address of the person you’d like to share the content with.
10. Click Send.
11. A popup will appear letting you know content sharing has started successfully and the recipient can now access the content.

Receiving Items

1. Go to MSU Denver’s Faculty and Staff Hub.
2. Click Canvas in the Teaching & Learning section.
3. Log in to your Canvas Account.
4. Click the Account button from the global navigation menu on the left. You should see a small number notification indicating you’ve received the material.
5. Click on shared content from the resulting drop-down menu.
6. Locate the Item you were expecting to receive.
7. Click the 3 dots (more options) icon to the right of the item you’d like to receive.
8. Click Import on the resulting drop-down menu.
9. Select the course you want to pull content into by searching the drop-down menu or typing the name of the course.
10. Select the module you want to put content in.
11. Select where in the module content should go from the drop-down menu.
12. Click Import.
13. You will see a message that says “import started successfully.”
14. Navigate to the module you imported content to.

Other Ways to Share Content

1. Items don’t need to be in modules to be shared. If your item is not in a module, click the appropriate item type from the course navigation menu on the left, then complete steps 7-10 for sending items.
2. You can import entire Canvas courses from the settings menu within a course. See our Copy a Canvas Course into the New Semester guide for instructions on how to do this.