When setting up your course, it can be helpful to know what your students will see when they use different features of your course. This page will help you see your Canvas course through your students' eyes.
View as Student Feature
To see what your Canvas pages, assignments, discussions, etc. look like to your students, use the "View as Student" button. You'll see it on the top right of most Canvas pages. It had the words "View as Student" and an icon that looks like a pair of glasses.
When you click this button, you are seeing what a student would see when viewing your course. You can use this button to make sure that the correct navigation links are showing or test out assignments and quizzes or just get a sense of how your course looks and functions for students. When you're done, you can click "Leave Student View" in the lower right corner of the screen to return to your normal faculty view.
Student Gradebook View
Knowing how the gradebook looks to students can help you support students, especially those who are new to Canvas. To find their grades in a course, students should go to that course in Canvas and select "Grades" from the navigation links, so it's important that you don't hide the "Grades" link if you are editing the navigation links in your course. To see what the grades look like from the student view, use the "View as Student" button to go into a quiz or assignment and complete it as a student. Now, you can go to "Grades" in the navigation list and see what students see. After you practice being a student in "View as a Student", you can click "Reset Student" in the lower right corner of your screen to remove any grades from quizzes or assignments you took in student view and then click "Leave Student View" to return to your usual view.
Using a Test Student
If you don't choose "Reset Student" after completing quizzes or assignments in student view, you'll see a student named "Test Student" in your gradebook. This can be helpful because the items you completed as a "student" stay in the course so you can do things like test your rubrics on a fake student before you use them to grade actual students or try out commenting and feedback features. When you want to remove the test student, go back into student view and choose "Reset Student" and all of the data associated with the test student will be removed.