Canvas hands back every file you submitted. It hands back nothing your instructor wrote, and that is the half you cannot rebuild.
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Canvas will hand you every file you ever submitted, in one click, for every course you have taken. It will not hand you a single word your instructor wrote back. That asymmetry catches almost everybody, and it matters because the feedback is the half you cannot reconstruct.
Your own essays are already on your laptop somewhere. The three paragraphs explaining why the argument in section two did not hold, the marked-up PDF, the rubric with the examiner's note against each criterion - those exist in exactly one place, and that place stops being yours on a date nobody tells you.
This one is genuinely good and very few students know it exists. It is not per course - it covers everything you have ever submitted.
What arrives is every file you uploaded to an assignment, across current and concluded courses, plus anything you typed into the rich text editor saved as an HTML file. Group assignments are included even where a team mate did the submitting.
The export expires after 30 days. It is generated on request and then deleted, so this is not a link you can bookmark and come back to after graduation. Generate it and save the ZIP somewhere permanent the same day.
The export contains your work and nothing about how it was received. Specifically, none of this is in it:
So the export is a good first move and a bad last one. Run it, then go and collect the feedback separately.
Canvas scatters feedback across three different places on one screen, which is why it is easy to save one kind and never notice the others. Open any graded assignment and you are looking at all three at once.
| Feedback | Where it is | In the export? |
|---|---|---|
| Marks on the document | DocViewer, behind View Feedback | No |
| Written comments | Comment sidebar on the submission | No |
| Audio and video comments | Same sidebar, played in Canvas | No |
| Rubric with criterion notes | Submission details page | No |
| Grade and score | Grades page | No |
| The file you submitted | Your own upload | Yes |
Annotations are the ones people most want and most often lose, because they are not part of your file. Canvas renders them in a viewer on top of it, so downloading the file from your own submission gives you a clean copy with nothing on it.
If the button says "Preview" rather than "View Feedback", stop looking. That means the file type is not DocViewer compatible, and a file DocViewer cannot open is a file nobody annotated. There is nothing to save; check the comment sidebar instead, which is where the feedback for those submissions ends up.
Do this per assignment. It is tedious and there is no bulk version, so be selective: the assignments worth ten minutes of your time are the ones whose feedback you would actually reread.
These have no download button anywhere, which surprises people who assume feedback must be exportable somehow. Your options are ordinary ones.
Print the submission details page to PDF. The browser's print dialogue offers "Save as PDF" as a destination on every platform, and the submission details page carries the rubric, the score and the comment thread together. One page, one PDF, and it captures all three at once. Expand every comment first; a collapsed thread prints collapsed.
Audio and video comments need a different approach. They play inside Canvas and there is no save option. If a recorded comment matters, play it and write down what it says. That sounds primitive and it is the only reliable answer.
Grades. There is no student-side CSV export of your own grades. Print the Grades page to PDF per course, which also captures the per-assignment scores and any comment icons.
If you have twenty courses and an afternoon, do it in this order. It is sorted by how permanently the thing disappears, not by how much of it there is.
Before the course concludes, not after. A concluded course usually goes read-only, and read-only is survivable: you can still open it and still print. What is not survivable is the enrolment ending, at which point the course leaves your dashboard entirely and neither the submission page nor the export can reach it.
The dates differ by institution and nobody emails you about them. Canvas access after graduation covers the three separate ways access ends and roughly when each one bites.
Canvas Downloader can save assignment feedback as it downloads a course: the grade and score, the rubric with its per-criterion comments, the full comment thread, and any file a teacher attached to a comment - one readable page per assignment, alongside the course material.
It does not capture inline annotations. Those are drawn inside DocViewer rather than stored on the file, so the per- assignment Download button above is still the way to keep those.
No. Canvas has a one-click export of your submissions - Account, then Settings, then Download Submissions - but it deliberately excludes annotated submissions, comments, rubrics and grades. There is no built-in bulk export of feedback, so it has to be collected per assignment.
No. The ZIP holds the files you uploaded and any text-entry answers saved as HTML, for current and concluded courses. It contains no grades, no instructor comments and no annotated versions of your work.
Because that file type is not compatible with Canvas DocViewer, which is the tool that displays annotations. If you only see Preview, there are no inline annotations to save on that submission, so check the comment sidebar instead.
Open the assignment from Grades, click View Feedback to open the document in DocViewer, then click Download. The PDF you get has the annotations flattened into the page. Downloading the file from your own submission instead gives you the clean copy you uploaded, with nothing on it.
Eventually. A concluded course normally becomes read-only, so you can still open and print it. Once your enrolment ends the course leaves your account altogether, and at that point neither the submission page nor the export can reach it.
Not directly - recorded comments play inside Canvas and have no download option. If a recorded comment is substantive, the practical answer is to play it and write down what it says while you still can.
Thirty days. Canvas generates the ZIP on request and deletes it after that, so save the file somewhere permanent the same day rather than treating the export page as storage.
No. Opening or downloading your own submission and its feedback is not reported to anyone. Canvas records page views in its own access logs exactly as it does when you browse a course normally.