What do I need to do at the end of the quarter?

Last updated: February 28, 2023

This tutorial takes you through the necessary tasks for wrapping up a course and suggests a few things to consider to plan for future use of course content.

At or near the end of the quarter, you can:

Submit grades

When grading for the term is open, you can go directly to GradePage or follow the link provided in the email reminder from the Registrar. GradePage has a button that you click to begin the process of importing your grades from Canvas and submitting them online.

Before you begin the process of importing grades, you should create a backup of your Canvas gradebook. To do this, you will create a .csv file of your grades and then download to your computer. Also, ungraded assignments must be set to 0 and all assignments unmuted in Canvas in order for the students’ scores to import correctly to GradePage. Learn about importing Canvas grades.

To download a .csv file of your Canvas gradebook follow these steps:

  1. From within your Canvas course, in the course navigation, click Grades.
  2. At the top of your Gradebook, click the button with the gear icon.
  3. In the menu, click Download Scores (.csv).
  4. In the Save File dialog box, give your file a name that will be useful for archiving. You might want to include the year, term, and/or class title in the file name.

Inventory course content

Review and inventory course content. Consider archiving select content.

Export your course

Consider any future uses of the course content. Will another instructor be teaching this course next semester? Would you like to share the course content with someone at another institution? Do you need a portable archive of the course? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you will want to export your course from Canvas.

To export your course, follow these steps:

  1. From within your course, in the course navigation, click Settings.
  2. On the right side of the screen, in the sidebar, click Export Course Content.
  3. On the Content Exports page, make sure that the radio button for Course is selected, and then click Create Export. A progress bar will appear. Time for export will vary depending on the amount of course content.
  4. When the export is complete, a link appears: New export: Click to Download. Click this link.
  5. In the dialog box, you will see an .imscc file: “your course name”-export.imscc. You can change the file name for archiving purposes.

Canvas sends a message to your default email account notifying you that the course export is complete. This message includes a link for downloading the exported file.

To share the file, simply attach it to an email (keeping in mind email provider file limits). You can also keep it for your own use, to import to a future Canvas course.

If your course contains Panopto recordings, you will need to copy and move Panopto recordings to the new instance of your Canvas course. If you simply copy the pages, the embedded videos will not be viewable by students in the new Canvas course.

Make the course read-only for students

By default students retain read-only access to courses for two years after the Term end date. However, instructors can choose to unpublish files or set the course to be unavailable to students after setting a course end date.