Canvas Course Downloader & Exporter
Extension Actions
- Extension status: Featured
- Live on Store
Download, export, and back up Canvas LMS course files, pages, assignments, grades, and more into organized folders.
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, 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 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
- 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 embedded in page content that don't show up in the course file browser
Other things worth knowing:
- Batch mode lets you select multiple courses at once, including past/completed courses, and download them all
- ZIP bundling 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.
Latest reviews
- Nej Hrib
- I downloaded the course, but nothing works when I'm offline. When I click on a module, it just takes me to a page that says "You're Offline". What's the point of downloading something if I can't permanently access it offline? Once they delete the course, I also don't trust that it will remain accessible even when I'm online. Going to to try a different downloader...
- Derex
- Works very well and is open source. Not invasive at all and does what it's told. Would be cool if it had styles though instead of plain html. However it works very very well without needing any token/
- Anna Hyer
- Really well done, excellent GitHub documentation, and works right out of the box.
- Sofia Zampedri
- As a student, this extension is super useful and allows me to study for exams more efficiently by importing the material into an AI. It's very well made and works flawlessly! I'm really glad it's free because students can really benefit from it.