Exporting assignment description pages

I have a number of course for which I need to export or otherwise download the assignment brief pages (the descriptions of the assignments, NOT the submitted student assignments). How can I do this ? I'd like them to be saved in some human-readable, and (ideally) editable format, like Word, or PDF, without requiring an LMS.

Each course has 10-20 assignments and there are about 20 courses.

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Accepted answers

James

@DanielHOWE

Add /graphiql to the end of your Canvas dashboard URL. This opens the graphQL explorer.

In the middle section, paste this code. Change the 3903130 to the Canvas ID for your course.

query assignmentDescriptions {
  course(id: "3903130") {
    assignmentsConnection {
      nodes {
        name
        description
      }
    }
  }
}

After changing the course ID, click the Run (black triangle in a circle) button at the top.

The output will appear on the right side.

It will be in JSON format containing the name and assignment description of the assignment. The description will be in HTML format.

It looks something like this.

{
  "data": {
    "course": {
      "assignmentsConnection": {
        "nodes": [
          {
            "name": "Public Transit Data",
            "description": "<p>This assignment is part of the <a title=\"Public Transit\" 
... whole bunch of lines removed for brevity ...
towards your grade or have any impact other towards earning a badge.</p>"
          }
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}

Now we need to convert it into a usable and readable format.

Select all of the text starting with the left bracket [ after the "nodes": at the top and all the way through the bottom up to and including the closing right bracket ]. Do not include the four closing right braces } at the bottom.

Copy that text.

Now go to some tool that will convert JSON to HTML. I found one at Code Beautify, but there are likely others.

For the Code Beautify converter, you put your JSON in the left side and click Convert to HTML. You can then select and copy the output and then paste it into a Word document. Don't click the Copy button at the top right, it copies the HTML code, not the output. You can also download it as an HTML file and open with a browser (you could then print to a PDF or do whatever you want to with it).

It doesn't have the Canvas styling that goes along with things, but it does get you all of the assignment descriptions really quickly without having to go through each one individually.

Edit: clarified how far to select when copy/pasting the output.

All comments

paul_fynn

"Right Click" on the Assignment then select "Print".

One of these areas where it might be nice to have a print option on screen across Canvas assets....

Chris_Hofer

Hi @DanielHOWE ...

If you are an instructor, you could export your course to a *.imscc file.

How do I export a Canvas course?

Then, after you download that file, you can change the extension on the file to a *.zip format. Next, unzip the folder, and then open up the exported zip folder on your computer. You're going to see a bunch of folders that have a long series of number and letters. Most of these are the individual assignments in your course...and you're going to have to go into each folder to see exactly which assignment it is. Within each of these folders are two files...one of which is the name of the assignment in your course (the other is labeled "assignment_settings"). If you open up the other file, it will probably open up within your browser, but you should be able to open up the file in something like MS Word as well. I just tried this with my own sandbox course and MS Word on my laptop, and it worked as expected.

I hope this will help a bit. Sing out if you have any questions...thanks!