Q. Can I allow everyone in Oxford University to see and visit my Canvas course?

A. Yes. Some departments wish to make some courses accessible to all Oxford staff and students. There is an 'Oxford Users' setting in a Canvas course. This allows all users with an Oxford SSO login the ability to view (read-only) any course that has been set in this way by the local administrator or teacher. It will also allow your course to be searched if users select the 'Oxford Only' filter in the Search tool.

Note: For Oxford users to be able to navigate to your course, you will need to provide the course URL via some other means (e.g. on a website or in a course handbook) since Oxford users in general will not receive any course invitation.

You will find the 'Oxford Users' option in Settings for each course container:

Q. I have set visibility in my Canvas course to 'Oxford Users', but why are Oxford students getting the error message "Failed getting file to preview" when they try to access a file?

A. The visibility setting 'Oxford Users' is a local customisation. Unfortunately, this is currently (Nov 2022) not recognised by Canvas if a particular file has the default access permission "Inherit from course" (under Files > Manage usage rights). The workaround is to select different visibility settings (Settings > Visibility) for the course ('Oxford users') and all the files ('Institution') within the course: