Canvas Course Downloader for Canvas LMS by Jasper

Save your Canvas courses to your computer before you lose access. One click on a course page saves every file, page, assignment and announcement, plus your own submissions and grades, as folders or a ZIP that opens without internet.

When a term ends, Canvas courses turn read-only or disappear. When you graduate, your login can close the same day. Saving a course file by file takes an evening. This takes one click.

How it works

1. Open a course in Canvas and press Download course, next to the course name.
2. The course saves in its own tab. Keep using Canvas, or close it.
3. Open the "Open me" page in the download.

For many courses at once, press Download courses on your Canvas Dashboard and tick the ones you want, current or past. Or press Alt+Shift+D on a course page.

What you get

• Files in their Canvas folders, plus files that only appear in modules or are linked inside pages
• Pages, assignments with their rubrics and due dates, announcements, discussions, quizzes, modules and the syllabus
• Your own submissions with feedback, and your grades as a spreadsheet (CSV)
• Videos and audio uploaded to Canvas itself, with captions
• An "Open me" page that works offline: the course by module, and anything that couldn't be saved, with the reason
• Deadlines.ics with every due date, for your calendar
• Pages as web pages or Markdown, saved as one ZIP per course or as folders

Study with AI

Pick "A study pack for AI" and a download becomes a few tidy files for NotebookLM, ChatGPT or Claude: a course guide with deadlines and grading, one file per module, and the slides and PDFs. When a course has more files than the tool accepts, the pack is split into several notebooks or projects. A study pack never contains other students' work. For coding tools there's also a Markdown copy with AGENTS.md, llms.txt and course.json.

Only what's new

Download a course again and it skips the files you already have. Courses you saved before get a short note on your Canvas Dashboard that names what's new, with a button to download only that.

For teachers

Archive the courses you teach before a term closes or your school changes systems: files, pages, assignments, quizzes with their questions, discussion prompts and every deadline. Students' work stays out unless you turn on "Include students' work". Then the copy also holds every submission, the gradebook and quiz results. Optionally, it saves the .imscc course package Canvas makes for importing the course again.

Private

• No account and no API token. It uses the Canvas you're already logged in to, on any school's Canvas address.
• Nothing about you or your courses is sent to the developer or anyone else. No analytics, no tracking.
• It talks only to your Canvas, plus GitHub once a day for the project's star count.
• It doesn't submit, post or change anything in your courses.
• Open source under the MIT license: read the code.

Why it asks for access to all websites: schools run Canvas on their own web addresses, so the extension checks each page to see whether it's Canvas. On every other site it stops at once and reads nothing.

Good to know

• Recordings in other tools (Panopto, Kaltura, Canvas Studio, YuJa, Zoom) can't be downloaded. Videos uploaded to Canvas itself can.
• You need to be logged in to Canvas.
• Downloads go to your Downloads folder. Choosing another folder needs Chrome or Edge.

Free, without ads, made by a student. If it saved you an afternoon, a review helps other students find it. Something missing? The "Open me" page says what and why. Still stuck: report a problem.

Canvas is a trademark of Instructure, Inc. This add-on is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by Instructure.