The Courses area in the Global Navigation menu allows for the accessing of courses and the specifying of which courses appear in the Dashboard area.
When you click Courses on the left hand Global Navigation menu this popup appears.
This popup lists the courses that are set to appear on your Dashboard. You can also click All Courses here to navigate to a list of all of your courses.
Once you have navigated to the All Courses area by clicking Courses and then clicking All Courses you are met with a screen like this.
You will see a list of the courses that you are enrolled in. You will see that you have a little star to the left of each course. By clicking this star to make it filled in with orange, it will be a course on your Dashboard if it is published. From semester to semester you can make courses hide from your Dashboard in this way to clean up your Dashboard area.