Hi @jill,
After lots of trials and errors, I did find out that the Site domain had to be courses.domain.ca which is contrary to what the documentation says…
Enter the domain name for the site. This is the domain name in the URL for the site. For example, myuniversity.edu .
It should clearly states the fully qualified domain name in order not to confuse the host part of a FQDN with the domain part of a FQDN.
host and domain are two different things for old sysadmin / devops like me 
Give an example like lms.myuniversity.edu instead of just myuniversity.edu. Not everyone will understand that the last one is not just a domain name unlike the previous which is clearly, at least for me, a site running off a domain.
Thanks for confirming what took me a long time to figure out. I really appreciate it.