Course visibility options can be customized and allow access to different user roles. The visibility setting offers three choices for a course:

• Course: The course is available to all users associated (enrolled) in the course. This option is the default setting.

• Institution: The course is available to users associated with this institution. This option allows users in your institution to view your course before they enroll in the course. For this option, users can only view the course if they are given the link to the URL or the course is included in the Public Course Index. 
The course content shown to authenticated users is the same content shown to the public for publicly visible courses.
• Public: The course is available to anyone with the URL. If a public course is unaccessible to unauthenticated users, your institution may require a login and password to view all courses within their Canvas instance.

As part of course visibility, you can also customize content visibility.

To learn more about visibility options, view the Canvas Course Visibility Options PDF.