Why courses go missing from your Canvas dashboard

If you have ever starred a course in Canvas, your dashboard shows only starred courses. If you've starred none, Canvas silently substitutes a default list of your current courses (capped at 20). Nothing on screen tells you which mode you're in — which is why courses you starred last term can hide the ones you're taking now.

What you see

You starred two classes last spring. This fall, half your courses are missing from the dashboard and you didn't change anything. The courses are still there — your enrollments are fine, the work is still assigned, and the course cards reappear the moment you go looking for them under All Courses. It is the dashboard's selection that is stale, not your registration.

Because the dashboard is the first screen Canvas puts in front of you, a course that never appears there can go unnoticed for weeks. A course with no card on the dashboard is one you have to remember to go looking for — no error message, no notice that it is missing.

Why it happens

Canvas's course-menu logic returns your favorites if any exist, otherwise a default selection: menu_courses = favorites.empty? ? courses : favorites + … with the cap read from menu_course_limit (default 20). Newly enrolled courses are never auto-added to a non-empty favorites list, and the API gives no signal distinguishing "you chose these" from "we chose these for you."

Two consequences follow from that one branch:

Starring is sticky across terms. Favorites are not reset when a term ends — a star you set last spring is still set this fall.
The empty case looks like the full case. A student who has never starred anything sees a sensible list and reasonably concludes the dashboard shows everything. It shows a default — and that default is capped.

For a typical course load, the twenty-course default is rarely the cause; stale favorites usually are.

What you can do about it

In Canvas, go to Courses → All Courses and star the courses you're actually taking this term (or unstar everything to fall back to the default list). Do it once at the start of each term.

Either mode is fine as long as you know which one you're in. If you want the dashboard to be a deliberate, curated list, star exactly this term's courses and unstar the rest. If you would rather not maintain it, unstar everything and let Canvas's default selection do the work.

A few things worth knowing while you're there:

All Courses is not filtered by your favorites. It is where to look when the dashboard seems short a class. If a course you are currently taking appears there but not on the dashboard, stale favorites are the most likely reason — past-term courses are expected to be listed there and not on the dashboard.
A missing course card is not a missing enrollment. Before emailing anyone, check All Courses; if the course is listed, nothing is wrong with your registration.
A course can also be unpublished. Instructors publish courses on their own schedule, and an unpublished course is generally not visible to students yet. If it is absent from All Courses too, that — or an enrollment problem — is the more likely cause, and it is one only your instructor or registrar can fix.
Check the dashboard again after add/drop. Any course you add after you have starred anything will not join the dashboard on its own.

Whatever the dashboard shows, the syllabus is still the only complete record for anything an instructor never entered into Canvas.

Sources

canvas-lms, app/models/user.rb (master branch, retrieved 2026-07-30): the menu_courses favorites fallback —
```
menu_courses = if favorites.empty?
                 courses
               else
                 favorites + courses.reject { |c| can_favorite.call(c) }
               end
```
— and the limit, Setting.get("menu_course_limit", "20").to_i. https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/blob/master/app/models/user.rb

Line numbers move between releases; the method names above are the durable anchors.