Removing courses from Canvas/ archiving

[IlariaHenein]

I’m looking for—an archiving solution that allows us to remove old courses from Canvas while keeping backups of everything, including files. So far, I haven’t found a solution outside of K16. Have you come across any reliable process or vendor for this? If anyone else has successfully done this, I’d love to hear how.

[Gabriel33]

As a backup, you can "Export Course Contents" in the course settings. That should make an imscc file (which is really a renamed zip file) with all files, quizzes, pages, settings...

[IlariaHenein]

Thanks for your response! I’m aware of the “Export Course Content” option, but my goal is to archive courses while also preserving student submissions, discussions, and grades. Do you know of any alternative methods or tools that can retain all student data when archiving courses outside of Canvas?

[Gabriel33]

I see, sorry, as faculty, I am not focused on that type of issue (just focused on backing up my own material, not on making sure student data is saved elsewhere long term).

It should be possible to get all student work and submissions through the API, but that's probably going to be a bit of a mess.

[chriscas]

Hi @IlariaHenein,

Outside of K16, I haven't really seen options for what you want to do.  The imscc/zip export @Gabriel33  mentioned would be great if you didn't want student data and didn't want things to be in a format you could easily use outside of importing back to Canvas.  So that really begs the question of whether you just need the content for archival purposes, or would you want to have it actively available in Canvas again in the future?  If the former, you may be able to use Canvas Data 2 to get almost an entire backup of your Canvas database.  If you would want to revive a course site later on with the student info included, that would be a big undertaking.

-Chris