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Technology Consigliere Canvas tools for teachers

Canvas course exporter

Saves a Canvas course as Word documents and Excel spreadsheets you can actually open, read, and print. No account, no access token, nothing to install.

Beta

Install it

  1. Show your bookmarks bar. Press Ctrl + Shift + B, or Cmd + Shift + B on a Mac.
  2. Drag the blue Export Canvas course content button below up onto that bar. That's the whole install. The tool lives inside that bookmark.
Export Canvas
course content

Clicking the button on this page does nothing. It only works from inside a Canvas course.

Can't drag it?
  1. Right-click your bookmarks bar and choose Add page in Chrome or Edge, or Add Bookmark in Firefox.
  2. Name it Export Canvas course content.
  3. Open the plain text file, select all, copy, and paste it into the bookmark's URL field.
  4. Delete any older copy of this bookmark, so you never click a stale one by mistake.
Version
0.7.2, beta
Runs on
any page inside a Canvas course you can see
Needs
nothing beyond your normal Canvas sign-in
Browsers
Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari

Use it

  1. Open the Canvas course you want to save and sign in as you normally would.
  2. Click Export Canvas course on your bookmarks bar. A small panel opens.
  3. Choose what to include, then click the export button at the bottom of the panel.
  4. Leave the tab alone until it says Done. Your browser downloads one .zip file.
  5. Double-click the .zip to open it. Your content is inside, named in plain English and sorted into folders.

What it does, and what it can't

What it does

  • Saves assignments, pages, discussions, announcements, and the syllabus as Word documents.
  • Saves Classic Quizzes with matching answer keys, plus question banks.
  • Saves rubrics as Word documents and as importable spreadsheets.
  • Saves the gradebook as a spreadsheet, if you tick that option.

What it can't do

  • New Quizzes. Canvas doesn't make their questions available this way, so you get a short note listing which ones you'll need to handle yourself.
  • Files you uploaded (PDFs, slide decks, images). Canvas already does this: open your course Files, select all, and click Download.

Permissions and privacy

Running a tool somebody else wrote, inside a Canvas session you're signed in to, deserves a straight answer. Here it is.

  • It runs in your own Canvas session. No password, no token, no account to make. It uses the sign-in you already have, in the tab you already have open.
  • It sees only what your role can see. It asks Canvas for things the same way you do, as you. It can only reach courses you already have access to.
  • It stores nothing. The only thing it saves is the .zip you asked for, in your own Downloads folder. Nothing is sent anywhere except your own Canvas site.
  • No remote code. The whole program lives inside the bookmark. Nothing is downloaded when you click it. You can read every line in the source.

Your institution hasn't reviewed this. If that matters where you work, ask your Canvas or IT team before you use it. I'd rather you ask than assume.

When it breaks

This is still being tested across different browsers and locked-down, IT-managed computers. If it doesn't work on your machine, that's useful to know. Tell me what happened: your browser, whether your computer is managed by your institution's IT, and what happened when you clicked. You won't break anything by trying.

Page look out of date? GitHub can keep showing an older copy for a few minutes after an update. Hard-refresh with Ctrl + Shift + R, or Cmd + Shift + R on a Mac.

Already installed? Your bookmark keeps the version you dragged. To update, drag the new button to your bar and delete the old one.

Canvas course exporter 0.7.2, beta. What changed.

License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). Free to use. Credit required. Not for commercial use without permission. Full license.