Canvas Course Downloader

Canvas courses disappear after the semester ends. This extension lets you download, export, and back up everything from your courses before that happens: files, pages, assignments, discussions, announcements, modules, quizzes, your syllabus, and even your grades as a CSV.

It works on any Canvas LMS instance, whether hosted on instructure.com or your school's own domain. Just navigate to a course page and click the download button. The extension uses your existing Canvas session, so there's no API token to set up.

Export your course materials to use with AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or NotebookLM. The organized folder structure and clean HTML (or Markdown) exports make it easy to upload everything and turn your courses into a personal tutor, generate study guides, or search across all your materials at once.

What you can download:
- All course files with the original folder structure preserved
- Pages, assignments, discussions, and announcements saved as HTML with scripts stripped out
- Quizzes, including your own score and your answers when your instructor allows it
- Module structure with any files referenced inside them
- Your syllabus as a standalone HTML file
- Grades exported as a CSV with assignment names, due dates, scores, and letter grades
- Files and images embedded in page content that don't show up in the course file browser

Teaching a course? When you're a teacher or TA, the extension automatically archives the full picture (students still only ever get their own view):
- Every student's submissions, files, text, grades, instructor comments, and rubric scores
- A full class gradebook and student roster, with sections
- Complete discussion threads, including every student reply
- Quizzes with the question bank, answer key, and per-student scores

Other things worth knowing:
- Batch mode lets you select multiple courses at once, including past/completed courses, and download them all
- ZIP bundling (on by default) packs each course into a single .zip instead of hundreds of individual file downloads
- Incremental mode skips files you've already downloaded, so re-running only grabs what's new
- File filters let you exclude videos or skip files above a size limit
- A progress panel shows what's downloading, what failed, and lets you retry failures
- Each download includes a manifest.json with course metadata and file counts
- Configurable throttle delay between downloads to avoid hitting rate limits
- Keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Shift+D / Cmd+Shift+D) to start a download without opening the popup
- Presets for common scenarios: full archive, files only, text content only

The extension only communicates with your Canvas instance. No data is sent anywhere else. The entire project is open source at https://github.com/jasp-nerd/canvas-course-downloader if you want to check for yourself.