Courses are automatically provisioned well in advance of the beginning of each quarter. Canvas courses are generally available as soon as the official Time Schedule for the upcoming quarter is released.
To access your course, follow these steps:
- Go to http://canvas.uw.edu and log in with your UW NetID.
- In the left sidebar, click Courses.
- Scroll down and click All Courses. A list of all your provisioned courses will appear. To customize which courses appear in the Courses menu, click the star to the left of the course title.
When will my course be available?
Here are the approximate dates that your courses will be created in Canvas for future quarters. These dates are driven by the time schedule construction calendar of each of the three campuses.
| Autumn 2024 | Winter 2025 | Spring 2025 | Summer 2025 | |
| UW Bothell | March 25, 2024 |
Sept 23, 2024 |
Jan 6, 2025 |
Jan 20, 2025 |
| UW Seattle | Jan 29, 2024 |
July 22, 2024 | Nov 4, 2024 | Dec 5, 2024 |
| UW Tacoma | March 24, 2024 |
Sept 8, 2024 | Dec 15, 2024 | Jan 5, 2025 |
Canvas course creation logistics
Courses are automatically created in Canvas from the official time schedule as early as possible — even before the time schedule is officially published (except for UW Bothell, see note below). When time schedule construction is closed to departments, and the switch is flipped (not a literal switch, but still a manual task for the registrar’s office), the provisioning system begins querying for courses and creating them in the UW’s Canvas. Initially, course creation could take a couple of days to work through the over 10,000 offerings for each quarter. This date is different for each campus, each quarter because the time schedule construction calendar is different. A complicating factor is that the provisioning system can maintain three total quarters — current plus two future. All of that results in the dates you see above.
Note: For UW Bothell, course creation starts when the time schedule is published. This change was made in January 2023 at the request of the UWB registrar’s office.