Respondus 4.0 alternative: a QTI converter that runs on Mac and in the browser

How much does Respondus 4.0 cost?

Respondus sells it two ways. An individual instructor can buy a single-user license online, and Respondus does not publish that price on its site. An institution can buy a campus-wide license, which is priced on total student FTE and covers unlimited use by every faculty member: $1,695 a year under 2,500 students, $2,095 up to 10,000, $2,545 up to 20,000, $2,745 up to 30,000, $2,945 up to 40,000, and a quote above that.

Two details matter when you are budgeting. Licenses renew annually on August 1 for North American institutions, which is deliberately just before the fall term, and the first year is pro-rated on the academic calendar, so signing in February does not cost a full year. Institutions outside North America are permitted a January 1 renewal instead.

The campus-wide rate is good value at scale and it is worth saying so plainly. A university with 25,000 students pays $2,745 for unlimited faculty use, which is roughly eleven cents per student per year. The awkward tier is the small one: a community college with 1,800 students pays $1,695 for the same product, and if only four instructors actually use it, the per-user cost is a very different number.

Is Respondus 4.0 the same as LockDown Browser?

No, and this is the most common mix-up in the whole category. Respondus, the company, sells several separate products. Respondus 4 is the Windows authoring tool that builds exams and publishes them into a learning system. LockDown Browser is a completely different, student-side application that locks down the testing environment while a student sits an exam, and Respondus Monitor adds automated webcam proctoring on top of LockDown Browser.

That matters if you are searching or comparing, because almost all of the search volume around the Respondus name is students looking for LockDown Browser downloads and troubleshooting. If you are evaluating authoring tools, the product you want to read about is Respondus 4, and nothing on this page is about proctoring. VidQuiz does not proctor anything and is not an alternative to LockDown Browser.

What file formats does Respondus 4.0 import?

Respondus 4 imports questions from Microsoft Word with images imported intact, rich text, QTI, and tab or comma delimited files. That covers most of what a department already has sitting in a shared drive, which is exactly the point of the tool.

The gap is upstream of all four. None of those formats exists yet if the material you are assessing is a recorded lecture, a conference session or a training video. Somebody has to watch the recording and type the questions before Respondus 4 has anything to import, and that is the hour of work nobody wants. Generating the draft questions from the recording first, then exporting a file Respondus or the LMS can read, closes that gap without replacing anything else in the workflow.

Can Respondus 4.0 import a QTI file?

Yes. IMS QTI 1.x is on the published compatibility list next to Blackboard Learn 9.x, Brightspace 10.x, Instructure Canvas and Moodle 3 to 4, and Respondus ships a dedicated IMS QTI user guide alongside its four LMS guides.

That is useful in both directions. QTI 1.2 is the version Canvas, Blackboard Original, Brightspace and Sakai read most reliably, so it is the format to reach for when a bank has to move between systems rather than land in one. One detail catches people out: a valid QTI package is a zip file with imsmanifest.xml at the root. A loose .xml file gets rejected, usually with an error message that does not explain why.

Does Respondus 4 work with Canvas New Quizzes?

Respondus lists Instructure Canvas on its compatibility page without splitting Canvas into its two quiz engines, so check which engine your course is using before you publish anything. Canvas keeps Classic Quizzes question banks and New Quizzes item banks entirely separate, and questions do not move between them on their own.

A QTI 1.2 package is the route both engines accept, which is why it is worth having the file even when a direct publish is available. Import the package into the course, then confirm the questions landed in the bank you expected rather than the other one. Getting this wrong is a slow mistake to unpick, because the questions are genuinely there, just in the half of Canvas you were not looking at.

What is a campus-wide license for Respondus?

It is an institution-level license that lets every faculty member at the institution use Respondus 4 without buying individual seats. Respondus prices it on total Student FTE as reported by IPEDS, renews it annually on August 1 in North America, pro-rates the first year on the academic calendar, and requires a signed license agreement returned with a purchase order number or payment.

Procurement-wise it behaves like a site license rather than a subscription: there is a paper agreement, an annual invoice and a renewal date tied to the academic year, not a card on file. If you need a formal quote, Respondus asks for the institution name and the student FTE figure. Budget owners comparing this against a per-user monthly tool should compare on the number of people who will actually open the software, not on headcount.

What is the best Respondus 4.0 alternative?

It depends which half of the job you are trying to solve, and it is worth being honest that these are two different jobs.

If the questions already exist and you want them pushed straight into Canvas or Blackboard, complete with calculated formulas, MathType equations and images, nothing here replaces Respondus 4. The direct publish is real, batch publishing to several courses at once saves genuine time, and at a large institution the campus-wide license is cheap per head. Buy it.

If the questions do not exist yet because the material is a recorded lecture or a training video, and the person doing the work is on a Mac, that is a different problem and Respondus 4 was never built for it. VidQuiz reads a YouTube link directly and drafts multiple-choice questions with answers, explanations and timestamps, which you edit before anyone sees them. Then you export the format your system wants and upload it. The two tools can also sit side by side: generate the draft from the video, export QTI, and let Respondus 4 or the LMS take it from there.