Best Aiken Format Converter for Moodle

The best Aiken format converter for Moodle depends on whether your questions already exist. If they are finished and sitting in a Word file or a pasted list, the Mindstamp quiz format converter reshapes them into Aiken in the browser at no charge, and Formswrite does the same from a DOCX, PDF or Google Doc on its Pro plan ($19 a month or $49.99 a year). If there are no questions yet, only a recorded lecture or notes, a converter cannot help, and a generator such as the VidQuiz Aiken format generator writes the questions and exports the Aiken file in one step.

Every price and feature below was read on each vendor's own tool or pricing page in October 2026, in US dollars. The format rules come from the Aiken page in the Moodle documentation and from the importer source code itself, because a converter is only as good as the file Moodle actually accepts.

Aiken format converters compared

Tool	Input	Writes the questions?	Cost	Best for
Mindstamp quiz format converter	A quiz pasted as text, with answers marked by a star, a note or an ANSWER line	No	No charge, no account, runs in the browser	A clean list of questions you already typed
Formswrite Aiken converter	Word, PDF, Google Doc or a pasted list	No, it detects existing questions and options	Aiken export needs a paid plan: Pro $19 a month or $49.99 a year, Lifetime $150 once, School from $10 per teacher a year	Questions locked in DOCX or PDF files
Jivrus Form Builder	An Aiken file, or an existing Google Form	No	Plans appear only as images on its pricing page, so we do not quote a figure	Moving Aiken questions in and out of Google Forms
A general AI chatbot	Questions pasted into a prompt	It can, from pasted text	Whatever your chatbot subscription costs	One-off jobs where you will check every line
VidQuiz	A YouTube link, a recording transcript or up to 60,000 characters of notes	Yes, with the answer key and three wrong answers per item	A one-time demo of three quizzes, then from $49 a month or $24 a month billed annually	A quiz that does not exist yet, built from a lecture or training video

Three of the five rows do the same job: they take finished questions and change the layout. The difference between them is mostly the input format they accept and whether you have to pay to download the result. The last two rows are the only ones that can produce questions, and only VidQuiz exports straight to Aiken with the file already shaped to Moodle's parser.

Which Aiken converter is best for a Moodle teacher?

Start with where your questions live today, because that decides it faster than any feature list.

Your questions are in a document you can copy from. Paste them into the Mindstamp converter. It accepts the common ways teachers mark the right answer, writes Aiken alongside GIFT and CSV, and lists any question Aiken cannot hold as skipped instead of quietly mangling it. For forty questions it is the quickest route there is, and nothing leaves your browser.

Your questions are in a stack of Word files or scanned PDFs. Copying each one out is the slow part, and that is what Formswrite charges for. It reads the file, finds the stem, the options and the correct choice, and hands back an Aiken .txt. At $49.99 a year for Pro it is cheap if a department has a backlog of old exams to move into Moodle, and pointless if you only have one test.

Your quiz lives in Google Forms, or needs to. Jivrus Form Builder is the one tool here that imports Aiken into Google Forms and exports a form back to Aiken, which matters when one course runs in Moodle and another in Google Classroom.

You have no questions, only material. This is the case converters skip, and it is the most common one for anyone teaching from recordings. VidQuiz reads a YouTube link directly, or a Panopto, Kaltura, Zoom or Teams recording with the transcript the platform already produced, and writes the multiple choice items before exporting them. If the material is a PDF handout rather than a video, a tool built to turn the document itself into a set of questions is the better fit, since VidQuiz does not read PDF files.

How much does an Aiken format converter cost?

Between nothing and about $50 a year for a pure converter. The Mindstamp tool costs nothing and needs no account. Formswrite lets you start without a card but puts the Aiken download behind a paid plan, which is $19 month to month, $49.99 for a year, or $150 once for lifetime access. For a school, its School plan starts at $30 per teacher a year for the first ten teachers and falls to $10 a teacher above fifty, with a three teacher minimum.

A generator costs more because it does more of the work. VidQuiz starts at $49 a month, or $24 a month billed annually ($288 a year), after a one-time demo of three quizzes that runs the real generator on your own material. The fair comparison is not against a converter's price but against the hours it takes to write thirty good questions with believable wrong answers from a 50 minute lecture. For most instructors that is an evening per quiz.

What should a good Aiken converter check before you import?

Moodle's Aiken importer is strict and quiet about it. Reading the importer source, any line that is not an option or an ANSWER line is treated as the start of a new question, and a question left open when the next one starts is discarded. A converter worth paying for protects you from the failures that causes. Look for these:

• One line per question. A stem pasted from Word with a soft line break splits into two questions, and the first half is thrown away.
• Capital letters everywhere they matter. Options must start with a capital letter and a period or a closing bracket, and the key line must read ANSWER: with a capital letter after it. Moodle reads only the first character after the colon.
• A guard for stems that look like options. A history question that opens with U.S. or a stem labelled A) in the source is read as an answer choice and breaks the block around it.
• An honest skip list. Aiken holds single answer multiple choice only. Short answer, matching and multiple answer items cannot be expressed, and a good tool tells you which ones it left out.
• UTF-8 output. The Moodle documentation warns that curly quotes and other non ASCII characters cause import errors when the file is saved in another encoding.

The VidQuiz exporter was written against those rules line for line, and the Aiken format generator page lists each one next to what the file does about it.

Can ChatGPT or Gemini convert questions to Aiken format?

Yes, a general chatbot can reformat pasted questions into Aiken, and at least one Massachusetts community college publishes a guide showing faculty how to do it with Gemini. The catch is that a chatbot does not run Moodle's parser. It will happily return a two line stem, a lower case answer letter or an ANSWER line with two letters on it, and you only find out when the import preview comes back short.

If you go this route, read every block before you save the file, save it as UTF-8 plain text rather than pasting into Word, and import into a test category first. For a handful of questions that is fine. For a term's worth of quizzes, a tool that produces a valid file every time saves more time than the chatbot does.

Aiken or GIFT, which should the converter produce?

Choose Aiken when the questions are single answer multiple choice and you want a file anyone can read and fix in Notepad. Choose GIFT when students should see an explanation after answering, or when you need true or false, short answer or matching as their own types. Aiken has no feedback at all, so every explanation is lost on import.

Most converters above write both. VidQuiz does too, from the same quiz, so the decision can wait until you know how the quiz will be used. The Moodle GIFT format generator page covers the GIFT side, and the guide to importing questions into Moodle lists every format the question bank accepts and what each one drops. If your bank currently lives in a spreadsheet, start with importing Moodle questions from Excel, since core Moodle has no Excel importer.

The short version

For questions you already have, use Mindstamp when they are pasteable and Formswrite when they are trapped in DOCX or PDF files. For Google Forms in the loop, use Jivrus. For a quiz that has to be written from a lecture, a training video or your notes, paste the link or the text into VidQuiz above, edit the draft, and download the Moodle Aiken file with every answer key already set.