Background: In EEE Legacy, course files were most commonly uploaded and stored for delivery to students through the EasyWebsites Course Files section or the DropBox Course Files folder. In Canvas, course file storage is centralized in the Files area. Once uploaded, you can link to these files from almost anywhere you can enter text in your Canvas course space.
If you don’t have copies of your important course files on your computer, don’t worry. We’ll first cover the process of getting those files out of the Legacy system. While this does add a bit of extra time to the process, it also gives you the opportunity to go through class documents and decide what you really need for future courses.
Part 1: Downloading your files from EasyWebsites
Because there isn't a way to export all of the files in an EasyWebsite at once, you will need to download each file individually using the following steps.
| NOTE: If you have already gathered all of the necessary files for your course space, please feel free to skip to: |
- Navigate to the part of your EasyWebsite that contained the files. In this example I'm on the "Home" page.
- After scrolling down to the Class Files, right-click on the file you wish to download to your computer and choose “Save as” or “Save link as” depending on the browser you are using.
- You should be presented with a choice of where to save the downloaded files, or the file will download to your default Downloads folder. Whichever way your browser works, we highly recommend putting all these files in one particular folder so that it’s easy to upload them later.
- Repeat the above steps for any files you wish to download for transfer to Canvas.
Downloading files from DropBox
If you were using EEE DropBox to deliver your course files, you can download an entire DropBox folder at once by using the steps in the following EEE DropBox documentation.
- Open the your Canvas course space and navigate to the Files area.
- Next, click the blue Upload button to open the file browser.
- Once the file browser loads, locate the files on your computer you wish to upload into Canvas. You can use shift+click to select multiple files at once for upload.
- After you are happy with your selection, click the Open button to begin the upload.
- After your upload completes, you should see all of the files you selected listed in the main directory of the Files area.
(Optional) Step 3: Adding course file links to your Syllabus
In the steps below we will create a Class Files area in the Syllabus, then link to a number of files. Haven’t created a Syllabus yet? No problem! We have a guide for that, and if you follow it far enough it’ll lead you back here!
- Open the Syllabus area of your course and click the Edit button.
- Within the text of your syllabus, find a place to add a "Course Files" section. Then, using any desired formatting, type "Course Files", and hit return to go the next line.
In this example I will be placing it just after the course description, but it can be anywhere within the syllabus.
- Click on the Files tab on the Content Selector found on the right side of the page.
- In the list of files, find the first file link you with to insert into the Syllabus document.
- Clicking on the file’s name will automatically place a file link in the document wherever your cursor is.
- Repeat the above steps to add additional files.