Print a Course for Review?

Question

We have faculty who want to review and edit their Canvas course on paper for various reasons. Has anybody found a way to easily/quickly print all of your course content, including the Canvas formatting, without manually taking screenshots of each page and combining them?

The only way I've found so far is to:

* Use the Settings - Export Course Content tool > 
* Download the .IMSCC file > 
* Change the file extension from .IMSCC to .ZIP > 
* Extract all > 
* Open the Wiki_Content folder > 
* Combine all the .HTML files into a PDF.

However, the Canvas formatting is not included, so the result isn't a true representation of the course. I wondered if there was an effective browser extension to capture the course in Student View (without the global navigation bar, Canvas tools outside the course, etc.) or another method.

Jeff_F · Answer

This plug-in has the capability to print the page as you see it on the screen, and it does so expertly. It cannot process an entire course by itself.

I do have ideas on how to automate part of this, but it is a notable project requiring access to certain tools and of course the knowledge of how to use them. If I were asked to create a solution such as you are asking I would explore using Canvas Data (CD), Power Automate (PA), and a tool such as this browser plug-in. I would use CD to list the urls of all pages, assignments (including discussion topics, quizzes, etc.), the modules view, and anything else required. I would use that list of links with a robot process automation (RPA) tool such as PA to open one link at a time to load the content and then also take the snapshots of the content and save it into pdf format. I would be intentional with the file naming convention so that if I were to merge the pdf files together it would be easy to group similar content. But again, unless you have the tools and knowledge it would just make sense and be so much faster over developing a solution to take the time and save all the content into pdfs manually.

And another approach is to export the course in the ePub format. Then open the file in a reader and select print > PDF. This tool is useful for converting uPubs.

calibre - E-book management

jfountain · Answer

Thanks for the tip, Jeff! Does it only screenshot the page you're viewing or is there a way for it to crawl the whole course and gather all the screenshots automatically?

Jeff_F · Answer

Hello @jfountain - I've used this browser plug-in for many years. I hope it helps your faculty.

PrintFriendly - Print, PDF, and Screenshot Web Pages

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/printfriendly-print-pdf-a/ohlencieiipommannpdfcmfdpjjmeolj?pli=1