Bulk Export of Syllabi from Canvas

Recently, our Provost required all faculty to post their syllabi to every Canvas course. This policy will certainly prove beneficial to students.

As an admin, I have received questions about how we could bulk export all these syllabi to archive them for accreditation purposes. Has anyone written a script to do this? What are the limitations? I assume that you would need everyone to be consistent in how they upload their syllabus in the first place - text-based or file upload. Am I missing other concerns?

Thank you!

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Chris

Hi @awilson9,

We thought about going down this path for a while a few years ago... I even have some javascript to insert "template" language (university policies, disability statement, etc) onto the syllabus page so faculty wouldn't have to worry about that anymore. They would just have needed to put in the academic things for their course. Unfortunately, this idea was scrapped because of some faculty feedback (basklash). As you basically stated, to make something like this work without getting super complex, content would all have to be entered in a similar way (we were going to go the HTML route, as that would be the best experience for students, and the easiest to archive). Our faculty don't want to be forced to use Canvas, especially in a specific way. I did understand the difficulty some faculty would have getting their fancily-formatted syllabi into Canvas without looking some of the "look and feel", but I personally feel like the information is more important than the layout (but I recognize this is just my opinion).

If you go this route, you can definitely get the HTML from the API, or even perhaps just fetching each course sylabus page and saving that (as that would save the class schedule auto-populated from Canvas. If you want to allow faculty to use files for their syllabi, that does make things more difficult. Hopefully you could require faculty to put a link to their file on the syllabus page so you could parse the HTML and find the file source to save, but that can get complicated if there are multiple links and you don't know which is the correct one.

I know this isn't much of a solution, but hopefully a confirmation of your thinking. If you'd like the code to insert content onto the syllabus page, you can find it on my github.

-Chris

nsweeten

Did you get any results with this?

Now that the Canvas Syllabus tool is a worthwhile option (from being able to turn off the list of assignment links that auto-populates at the bottom), this is the next step for usage.

Maintaining syllabi in multiple locations is a pain. If Canvas would solve this issue, there would be a global cheer of relief.

jrkinsella

I noticed this thread about bulk exporting syllabi from Canvas, and I'm curious if this is still a pain point in 2025.

After experiencing this challenge firsthand, I've developed a Python script that automates syllabus collection across courses, accounts, and terms. It handles both HTML and file-based syllabi, preserves metadata, and creates organized archives. It also attempts to find alternatives, if the Syllbus tool is empty, elsewhere in the course.

I'm at a crossroads and would appreciate your input:

As I see it, I have two options for what to do next: 1️⃣ Share the script with the community 2️⃣ Develop it into a more robust solution with a proper UI

Before I decide, I'd love to hear:

How are you currently handling syllabus archival?
What features would make this process easier?
Would your institution consider a dedicated tool for this purpose?

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