Two minutes of clicking, no administrator, and a file you own. Here is exactly what to press, and the one choice in that dialog that trips most people up.
Whether you are moving institutions, backing up a course you spent years building, or trying another platform, the first step is the same: get your course out of Canvas as a file. Canvas supports this properly and, importantly for anyone without institutional backing, you do not need an administrator to do it. Exporting is a normal teacher permission.
The result is an .imscc file: a ZIP archive in the IMS Common Cartridge format. Because Common Cartridge is a published open standard rather than something proprietary to Instructure, other platforms can read it. That single fact is what makes your course portable at all.
.imscc. It already contains your quizzes along with your modules, pages, files, assignments and rubrics, so there is no separate quiz export to do afterwards. Quiz Export gives you a .zip holding quizzes and nothing else. If you export quizzes expecting a course, you will get a small file and discover the gap only when you try to import it.
One practical note: .imscc is not an extension your operating system treats as an archive, so it downloads as a single file and stays that way. A Quiz Export is a plain .zip, which macOS does expand automatically. If you are moving quizzes only and end up with a folder rather than a file, right-click it and choose Compress before uploading.
If you are curious, rename the extension from .imscc to .zip and unzip it. Nothing in there is encrypted or obfuscated. You will find:
| Inside the package | What it holds |
|---|---|
imsmanifest.xml | The table of contents. Every resource in the package, and the module tree with your item order and indentation. |
course_settings/ | Course name and code, your syllabus as HTML, assignment groups with their weights, module metadata including published state, and late-policy settings. |
web_resources/ | Every file you uploaded, including PDFs, slides, and images, with your original folder structure preserved. |
| Per-quiz folders | Your Classic Quizzes as QTI 1.2 XML, plus an assessment_meta.xml carrying time limit, allowed attempts, shuffle setting and the multiple-attempt scoring rule. |
| Assignment folders | Each assignment's HTML description and its points, submission types and due date. |
rubrics.xml | Your rubrics with criteria and rating levels, and which assignment each was attached to. |
| HTML pages | Your Pages and Wiki content, with formatting and embedded images intact. |
This is the part worth knowing before you plan around it, because no destination platform can conjure data that was never in the file.
None of this is Canvas being obstructive. It is a sensible boundary. A course package is your intellectual work; a gradebook is a set of student records belonging to the institution that collected them.
Canvas will not export a course larger than 50 GB. That ceiling is high enough that it almost never matters for one course; if you are near it, the cause is usually uploaded video, which is better hosted elsewhere and linked anyway.
Whatever you import into next will have its own, lower limit. ProfDesk accepts course archives up to 1000 MB, which comfortably covers a normal semester course. The real Canvas cartridges we test against run about 5 MB for a full course with slides, PDFs and four quizzes.
Once you have the file, you have options. You can keep it as a cold backup, which is sensible before any institutional migration. You can import it into another Canvas instance at a new institution. Or you can take it to a different platform entirely, which is the point of the format being a standard.
If you are moving because you no longer have an institution behind you, that last route is the one that matters, and it is worth checking what a destination actually reconstructs from the package before you commit. Modules, pages and files are the easy part; quizzes, rubrics and outcomes are where implementations differ.
ProfDesk reads it into a working course: modules in order, Pages, files, quizzes with their settings, assignments, rubrics and outcomes. Your Canvas course is never touched.
No. Exporting is a standard teacher permission in Canvas. You generate the file yourself from your course Settings page, with no help from institutional IT and no ticket.
Clicking through takes under a minute. Canvas then builds the package in the background. This usually takes a few minutes for a text-heavy course and longer for one with a lot of video or large PDFs. Canvas notifies you when the download is ready, so you do not need to keep the tab open.
No. A Canvas course export contains your teaching material only. Student submissions, gradebook data and enrolments are not included in the package. If you need those, export the gradebook separately as CSV from the Grades page. Check your institution's data policy first because that file contains student records.
It is a ZIP archive in the IMS Common Cartridge format, an open standard for moving course content between platforms. Other systems can read it because it is a documented standard rather than a proprietary format, which makes leaving Canvas possible.
Yes. Rename the extension from .imscc to .zip and unzip it. You will find an imsmanifest.xml table of contents, a course_settings folder, your pages as HTML, and your uploaded files under web_resources.
Canvas does not export courses larger than 50 GB. In practice almost no single course approaches that; a typical semester course with slides and PDFs is a few megabytes to a few hundred.