GuideBringing your Canvas course into Lecture Hat

Bringing your Canvas course into Lecture Hat

Lecture Hat works best when it has the actual materials from your course — slides, readings, your own notes — sitting next to your AI tutor. If you've been using Canvas all semester, you already have most of what you need. Here's the fastest way to get it into a Lecture Hat notebook.

This is a manual workflow that uses Canvas's own download buttons. No browser extensions, no scripts.

What you'll need

  • A Canvas account at your school
  • A Lecture Hat account
  • About five minutes per course

Step 1: Download your materials from Canvas

There are three places in Canvas where your teacher probably uploaded files. Try them in this order — pick whichever your course actually used.

Option A: Files tab (fastest if your course has one)

Most courses have a Files link in the left sidebar of the course page. This is the simplest path.

  1. Open the Files tab.
  2. You'll see a folder tree of everything your teacher uploaded.
  3. Click the folder you want, then click the Download button at the top of the file list. Canvas will package the folder into a single .zip.

If your teacher put everything under one root folder, downloading that one folder gets you the whole course in a single zip.

Option B: Modules tab (if your course is organized by week)

A lot of teachers organize materials in Modules instead — one module per week, each with the relevant files inside.

  1. Open the Modules tab.
  2. For each file in a module, click it.
  3. Canvas opens a preview page with a Download button in the top-right corner.

Modules don't have a built-in "download all" button, but if your course only has 10–15 modules, clicking through is faster than you'd think. If your teacher also mirrored the files under the Files tab, Option A is the shortcut.

Option C: A single lecture or reading

If you only want one file — say, this week's slides — find it wherever it lives (in Modules, on a Page, or attached to an Assignment), open it, and click the download icon. Done.

Step 2: Upload to Lecture Hat

Open a Lecture Hat notebook — either an existing one for this course or a fresh one.

  1. Drag your downloaded files (or the .zip from Option A) into the upload area.
  2. If you uploaded a .zip, Lecture Hat will unpack it and add each file to the notebook individually.
  3. Indexing starts in the background. PDFs get OCR'd, slides get parsed, and the knowledge graph fills in over the next few minutes. You don't have to wait — you can start chatting with the tutor right away, and citations get richer as indexing catches up.

Each file is capped at 100 MB. Lecture recordings and slide-heavy videos hit that easily — trim locally first, upload only the audio, or split large PDFs before importing.

Step 3: Use your tutor

Once your materials are in, the rest is normal Lecture Hat:

  • Ask anything. "Explain the difference between mitosis and meiosis using Dr. Smith's slides from week 3." The tutor cites the actual slide.
  • Generate practice questions. Pull a practice set from any chapter or topic.
  • Hover citations. When the tutor cites a slide or page, hover to peek at the source without leaving the conversation.
  • Add your own notes. Your own notes are usually the highest-value thing in a notebook — they reflect how you think about the material.

For context on how the AI side handles your content, see our AI disclosure page — Lecture Hat doesn't use your uploaded materials to train models.

Common questions

"My PDF won't download — it's locked." Some teachers lock files so they're only viewable inside Canvas. There's no workaround on your end. If you want to use the material with your tutor, the simplest move is to ask the teacher to enable downloads; most will.

"What about Pages? (the HTML content my teacher writes inside Canvas)" Canvas Pages don't have a download button. The cleanest workaround is to open the page, press Ctrl/Cmd+P, and "Save as PDF" — then upload that PDF.

"Should I use a Canvas bulk-download Chrome extension?" You don't need one. The Files tab's per-folder Download button hands you a zip of everything at once. Staying inside Canvas's own UI is faster than you'd expect and avoids any weird browser-extension permissions.

"What about my own notes from Notion / Obsidian / Apple Notes / Google Docs?" Export to PDF or .md from whichever app, and drag the file in. Lecture Hat handles all of those.

"What if I have a different LMS?" The same approach works for Blackboard, Moodle, D2L, and most others — find the equivalent of the Files area, download what you have access to, and drop it into Lecture Hat. The destination doesn't care which LMS you came from.

Wrap up

That's the whole workflow. First time through, it takes about five minutes per course. After that, when your teacher uploads something new, you can either drop it into Lecture Hat one-off or batch a re-download at the end of the week.

Once your notebook is loaded, the tutor stops being generic — it's working from your course, citing your slides, and ready for whatever's on this week's exam.