In May 2026, when ShinyHunters attacked Canvas, the EdTech community got a sneak peek at one of our vulnerabilities: when your LMS goes down, your teachers and students have nothing to work with. The standard recommendation of, "just export your course" downloads an.imscc file, but it requires Canvas to open. Which is offline. Which is a problem.
This session introduces a free, open-source tool built by a Canvas Admin using AI collaboration called CanvExporter, a course backup tool using the Canvas API to extract important content to your local desktop computer. Announcements, assignments, discussions, quizzes (with and without answer keys), quiz question banks, content pages, rubrics, and files are delivered as editable.docx and.csv files within organized subfolders. Teachers can open, print, and teach from these backups. No vendor. No subscription needed.
Attendees will see a live demonstration, leave with a GitHub link to CanvExporter, understand exactly what their institution needs to deploy it, and additional use cases that come up more often.
Chris Powell is the Canvas LMS Administrator at Western Washington University. He has spent a decade spotting trends and developing elegant solutions that create ease, efficiency, and access for his clients. He's enjoyed harnessing AI collaboration to create several open-source Canvas automation tools that have proven helpful to multiple institutions.
