Course Mirror

Our Project
Our Team

Inspiration

Our project was built to solve two major problems.

Accessing Canvas Courses even when Canvas is down. When Canvas went down on October 20, students suddenly lost access to assignments, lecture notes, and important study materials. We were completely dependent on one system, and without a backup option, learning came to a delay or even a stop. This raised an important question: “Why should our study materials disappear just because Canvas is down?” System outages can happen anytime, and students need a reliable solution that allows continuous access to their course content — even when Canvas is offline.
Preventing course material from disappearing every quarter At the end of each quarter or semester, Canvas automatically deletes all course content. Students must manually download every file to keep their materials, which is tedious, time-consuming, and easy to forget during finals. This made us ask another simple question: “Why should our study materials disappear after the quarter ends?” Our project solves this by automatically saving and organizing course materials, ensuring that students can revisit them anytime — without doing manual downloads.

What it does

A read-only mirror application and cloud for Canvas LMS that syncs course data every time you log in using Canvas API integrations.

How we built it

First of all, we brainstormed the idea. Then we assigned roles to each member. Arthur created Canvas courses and Canvas accounts. Javid is the main member who take charge in coding. Stacie and Ellie took charge in UI.

We use Figma, Github, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Additionally, Node.js and React.

Challenges we ran into

One major challenge was trying to access Canvas courses and synchronization. We wanted to use student ID and password, but for that we need an official authorization from Canvas, for which we don't have time to contact the Canvas Support Team. As a demo, we are using tokens integrations.

What's next for Course Mirror

For the future, we would like to be able to use Student ID and password, as same as Canvas log in. Smooth Real-Time Auto-Sync Multi-Platform Support Smoother Instructor Mode and Student Mode. Stronger cybersecurity upgrade: Zero-knowledge encryption, Student-only decryption keys, Role-based access. Version History for Files. When Canvas updates a file, CourseMirror will save the new version, keep older versions and let students compare changes.