Several faculty have asked about importing and exporting an entire course in Canvas. If you have a new Canvas site you can populate it with the content from a previously published course with just the press of a few buttons.

Step 1: Go to the original Canvas course, which you are going to be copying from, and select “Settings” in the left menu bar.

 Step 2:  You should see a page similar to the example image below. In the right hand menu select “Export Course Content” button.

Step 3: On the next page choose the type of content to export. If you want to export all the content in a course (images, pages, assignments, quizzes, etc…) then select “course”. If you want to export only the Quizzes then select “Quiz”.

Step 4: Canvas will download the entire course content in the form of an imscc file. You don’t need to be concerned about how to use the file or what the extension means. Simply download the file to your computer, re-upload it to your new Canvas site, and Canvas will do all the work for you .

Note: it may take a few minutes, or even up to 20 minutes, to download the file. This depends on your Internet connection speed and the size of your Canvas course.

Step 5: Go to your new Canvas course. Choose “settings” in the left hand menu bar.  Select “Import Content…” from the right hand menu.

Step 6:  Select “Content Type” and choose Canvas Course Export Package.  Upload the imscc file that you downloaded from the previous Canvas course. It will take a little bit of time for Canvas to un-archive the imscc file. After a few minutes your old course content will be copied. You should see all the modules and pages that were in the old course site.