Built for students, by people who remember the chaos.
I was a [INSERT: subject] student at [INSERT: school name] and Canvas showed me forty items with no way to know what to start. Every assignment looked equally urgent. I'd pick the wrong one, fall behind on something that actually mattered, and spend the next week catching up instead of learning.
Course Compass is what I built to fix that. A lightweight Chrome extension that lives inside Canvas, ranks your work by what actually moves your grade, and turns every study session into a small adventure. It keeps your data on your own device and refuses to do the thinking for you — because the whole point is that you learn it.
Five things we won't compromise on.
We're a small team building for the situation we were in not long ago. Every design decision in Course Compass comes back to one of these. When we're not sure what to build next, we re-read the list.
Aids learning — never replaces it
We quiz you, we surface your notes, we flag the assignment that will actually move your grade. We don't write the essay. The point of studying is what sticks in your head, not what ends up on the page.
Motivation through delight
Studying shouldn't feel like a punishment. Clipper the parrot, dubloon rewards, treasure chests, and streak badges exist because a little delight at the right moment is more powerful than any amount of guilt-tripping. Fun is a feature.
Affordable for students — always
The core tool is free and stays free. Paid plans are priced for student budgets — monthly, semester, or annual, whichever fits — and you can cancel any time with one email, no retention maze. We will never upsell harder than the product earns.
Privacy is sacred
Your notes, your coursework, your grades — these are yours. They live on your device by default. We don't sell data, we don't run analytics behind your back, and we're careful about the parts of your academic life that fall under FERPA.
Craft over churn
We'd rather ship one feature polished to the point of feeling obvious than ten features that feel rushed. Every interaction in Course Compass should feel considered — like someone actually thought about what it's like to be a student at 11 pm.
Meet Clipper.
Every compass needs a first mate. Ours is a parrot.
The study buddy who actually shows up.
Clipper is a green parrot mascot who lives in the corner of your browser, offers encouragement when you start a session, and squawks (politely) when you've been staring at a page without doing much. He's chatty if you want company, quiet if you need focus, and somewhere in the middle most of the time — you control the talkativeness dial.
Finish a focused study session and Clipper rewards you with a cracker. Read through a set of your notes and he reacts like you've done something worth celebrating — because you have. He's a bit pirate-themed, entirely fictional, and has somehow become the emotional core of Course Compass. We're not sorry about it.
He also does something more practical. The "Ask Clipper" feature lets you type any study question into the panel and Clipper searches your imported notes for the closest match — returning a snippet and a link straight to the source material. It's not AI-generated answers; it's retrieval from notes you actually wrote, so there's no guesswork or hallucination. Clipper finds what you put there. Which, it turns out, is exactly the note you needed.
During finals week, Clipper gets extra enthusiastic. We won't spoil it, but it involves double dubloons and a very specific energy that only comes from knowing the stakes are real.
Clipper has awarded over 10,000 crackers. He is very proud.Your notes stay yours.
We wrote a full privacy policy — here's the version a person can actually read.
Everything you import into Course Compass lives on your device by default. Your notes, PDFs, slides, and the search index built from them are stored in your browser's local storage — not on our servers. When you use an AI feature, the relevant text travels from your browser to our AI backend (running on Cloudflare) to process your request, and then it's gone. We don't retain it, we don't train on it, and we don't look at it. On paid plans, you can opt into cloud backup — it sends your notes index to our backend so "Restore from cloud" can bring it back on another signed-in device. It's off unless you turn it on, and it never runs for free-tier users. See the full privacy policy for the details.
We never ask for your Canvas password. Course Compass uses a read-only Canvas access token — a key you generate once from your Canvas account settings, not your login credentials. That token lives on your device and is used only to read your assignments from Canvas directly. It never touches our servers.
- Notes and files stay on your device by default
- No Canvas password ever stored or transmitted
- No third-party analytics or advertising trackers
- Not affiliated with Instructure, Inc. or Canvas LMS
- No lock-in — cancel any plan with one email
- AI features are opt-in; nothing is sent without a button click
Questions? We actually read email.
One person will see your message — not a support queue robot. We aim to reply within two business days, usually sooner.
[email protected]Ready to navigate your semester?
Course Compass is free to install. Add it to Chrome, point it at your Canvas, and let it tell you what to do next.