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Introduction

The Canvas Student Data Export Tool can export nearly all of a student's data from Instructure Canvas Learning Management System (Canvas LMS). This is useful when you are graduating or leaving your college or university, and would like to have a backup of all the data you had in canvas.

The tool exports all of the following data:

Course Assignments
Course Announcements
Course Discussions
Course Pages
Course Files
Course Modules
SingleFile HTML of Assignments, Announcements, Discussions, Modules

The tool will export your data in JSON format, and will organize it nicely into folders named for every term of every year. Example:

Fall 2013
- Econ 101
  - course files
  - modules
  - Econ 101.json
- English 101
  - course files
  - modules
  - English 101.json
Fall 2014
Fall 2015
Fall 2016
Spring 2014
Spring 2015
Spring 2016
Spring 2017
Winter 2014
Winter 2015
Winter 2016
Winter 2017
all_output.json

Getting Started

Dependencies

To run the program, you will need the following dependencies:
pip install requests
pip install jsonpickle
pip install canvasapi
pip install python-dateutil
pip install PyYAML

npm i github:gildas-lormeau/SingleFile

You can install these dependencies using pip install -r requirements.txt AND npm i

Then run from the command line: python export.py

Configuration

These are the configuration parameters for the program:

Canvas API URL - this is the URL of your institution, for example https://example.instructure.com
Canvas API key - this can be created by going to Canvas and navigating to Account > Settings > Approved Integrations > New Access Token
Canvas User ID - this can be found at https://example.instructure.com/api/v1/users/self in the id field
Path to Cookies File - file needs to be in netscape format, you can get your cookies via a tool like "Get Cookies.txt" by Rahul Shaw. This can also be left blank if an html images are unwanted.
Directory in which to download course information to (will be created if not present)
List of Course IDs that should be skipped

If single file fails to find your browser, you can set a path in singlefile.py. If you also want to run additional singlefile arguments that can also be done there.

Loading credentials from a file

To avoid manually entering credentials every time you run the program, you can create a credentials.yaml file in the same directory as the script that has the following fields:

API_URL: < URL of your institution >
API_KEY: < API Key from Canvas >
USER_ID: < User ID from Canvas >
COOKIES_PATH: < Path to cookies file >

You can then run the script as normal: python export.py

Contribute

I would love to see this script's functionality expanded and improved! I welcome all pull requests :) Thank you!

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