Archive or save lessons/activities

[JohnMemoli]

As the year comes to an end, I want to know if there is a way to save or archive activities and lessons.  I expect my district to delete coursework as the close of the year.

[scottdennis · Accepted solution]

Hi @JohnMemoli,

Due to the cloud hosted nature of Canvas it is actually much more common for institutions to close rather than dele previous courses so you may still have access to old courses (check with your local admin on that policy).  That being said, you have a number of options for preserving course content.  Probably the most commonly employed is to go to your course Settings to "Export Course Content" - either that or copy your content into a sandbox, or other course you will still have access.  Note that creating and downloading an export file of your course will preserve the content and structure but will not contain any student work or information.

[shapiros]

Can I save an exported Canvas course in One Drive? What format should it be saved as?

[Chris_Hofer]

@shapiros ...

This document describes how you can export a Canvas course to a file.  But, if you save the file to One Drive, it's not going to display the exported file in something that you'd be able to easily use.

How do I export a Canvas course?

As the information in the light blue box indicates, you could change the extension on the exported file to a *.zip file instead of *.imscc, and then you could unzip the file.  However, you'll have to navigate through the folders to find a bunch of HTML files that contain the content pages of your course.

Hope this helps a bit.

[JasonSimmons]

Hi John,

Instructure rolled out a new offering last year - Canvas Archiving (link below). Institutions are able to archive course content and student data, allowing them to back up their courses, reduce clutter, and secure sensitive student data.  Institutions can also access and retrieve content at any time. Thanks.

https://www.instructure.com/services/canvas-archiving

Best,
Jason