Best Quiz Converter for Brightspace and D2L

The best quiz converter for Brightspace depends on which half of the job you actually have. If the questions already exist in a Word test bank or an export from another system, you need a format converter, and Respondus 4 or a QTI 1.2 exporter is the shortest route. If the questions do not exist yet, a converter cannot help you at all, because every tool in this category moves a bank rather than writing one. The other thing that decides the shortlist is version: D2L states the QTI importer inside Brightspace Quizzes supports only up to QTI 1.2, so a converter that outputs QTI 2.1 is aimed at the wrong door.

Below is what each option actually does, what it costs, and who it suits. Prices and format support were read from each vendor in August 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a price, this article says so rather than repeating a number from a directory listing.

Quiz converters for Brightspace compared

Tool	Takes as input	Outputs for Brightspace	Price	Best for
VidQuiz	A YouTube link read directly; a pasted transcript for other recordings	QTI 1.2 zip, plus GIFT, Blackboard tab-delimited, Google Forms CSV, CSV, PDF	Free plan, then $19, $39 or $99 a month	Quiz banks that do not exist yet, drafted from a lecture or training recording
Respondus 4	MS Word, rich text, QTI, tab or comma delimited	Publishes directly into Brightspace 10.x	Campus license $1,695 to $2,945 a year by student FTE. Single-user price unpublished	Institutions with many instructors and existing Word test banks
D2L's own CSV template	A spreadsheet you fill in by hand	Native Question Library import, seven question types	Free, built into Brightspace	Small banks, and anyone who wants no third-party tool at all
text2qti	Plain text written in a Markdown-like syntax	QTI 1.2 package	Free, open source	Technical users comfortable at a command line
GETMARKED Digitaliser	DOCX and PDF, charged per page	QTI package	Basic $29 a year for 50 page credits	One-off conversions of a document you already have
In-house campus converters	Varies by institution	Question Library CSV	Free to that institution's staff	Faculty whose university already runs one

Read that table by input column first, not by price. Five of the six only reformat questions that already exist. That is the distinction that decides which tool is right, and it is the one comparison articles usually blur.

Which QTI version does Brightspace need?

QTI 1.2, for the fast path. A D2L staff member confirmed in the Brightspace Community in April 2026 that the QTI import inside Quizzes supports only up to version 1.2 of the standard. The Course Import tool under Import or Export or Copy Components will also accept QTI 2.x and 3.x packages, but only a subset of features in those standards is supported.

D2L's own course conversion support table agrees. Every source it lists, from Blackboard 6 through Common Cartridge 1.3, is mapped to QTI 1.2.1. So when a converter advertises QTI support, the useful question is which version it writes, and 1.2 is the answer you want for a question bank going into the Question Library.

This is also where Brightspace and Blackboard part company, which catches people who administer both. Anthology documents the Blackboard QTI importer for QTI 2.1 packages and for the Original Course View only. One QTI file cannot serve both platforms, so if you are converting for a mixed campus, plan on two exports rather than one.

Is Respondus 4 the best converter for Brightspace?

For an institution with existing Word test banks, it is the strongest option in the table, and it is the one most universities already license. Respondus 4 imports Word with images intact, rich text, QTI and tab or comma delimited files, handles 15 question types including calculated and algorithmic, and publishes directly into Brightspace 10.x as well as Blackboard Learn 9.x, Canvas and Moodle 3 and 4. It can batch publish to several courses in one step.

Two caveats decide whether it fits you. It runs on Windows 11 or 10 only, with no Mac build and no browser version, which is a real constraint on a campus where faculty are largely on Macs. And the published pricing is a campus-wide license, from $1,695 a year under 2,500 student FTE up to $2,945 over 30,000, renewing annually on August 1. A single-user license exists, but Respondus publishes no price for it, so an individual instructor cannot budget for it without contacting them. There is a free 30-day pilot of the single-user version only.

Can I convert questions into Brightspace for free?

Yes, two ways, and both have real limits. D2L's own CSV template is free and native: download it from Question Library, Import, Upload a File, then Download template CSV. It handles seven question types, and four documented types cannot come in by CSV at all, namely Fill in the Blanks, Arithmetic, Significant Figures and Multiple Short Answer. text2qti is free and open source and writes QTI 1.2, but you write your questions in its plain-text syntax first, which suits some people and not others.

The catch with the free CSV route is the layout. D2L's CSV is not one row per question with options across the columns. It is row-keyed: column A carries a keyword such as NewQuestion, QuestionText, Option, Answer, Choice, Match or Item, and column B carries the value. One question is a block of rows. Building fifty questions that way by hand is slower than most people expect, which is precisely why converters exist.

Why do my imported answers come out wrong?

The most common cause is a scoring scale that changes between question types in the same file. On a multiple choice question, the correct option is marked with 100 in column B and wrong options with 0. On a multiselect question, correct options are marked with 1, not 100. Nothing errors. The questions import, and the answer key is simply wrong.

The second most common cause is column placement, which also varies by type. Short answer text, matching choice text and multiple choice option text all belong in column C, but ordering item text goes in column B. D2L puts comment rows in its template reminding you which column each type expects, so tidying those out of the file removes the only reminder you get. If you are converting from a QTI file instead, check that it is a real package: a zip with imsmanifest.xml at its root, not a loose XML file, which gets rejected without a useful explanation.

What if the questions do not exist yet?

Then a converter is the wrong category of tool, and this is where most of the wasted time in this workflow goes. Someone with a recorded lecture, a compliance module or a recorded webinar does not have a formatting problem. They have twenty questions to write, and converting nothing into QTI produces nothing.

VidQuiz starts one step earlier. Paste a public YouTube link and it reads the video and drafts multiple choice questions with the correct answer marked, a one-line explanation of why it is right, and a timestamp back to the moment each question came from, which is useful when a student disputes an item. For a Vimeo file, an MP4, a webinar recording or a screen capture, paste the transcript instead, because VidQuiz has no speech-to-text of its own for those sources. Then export QTI 1.2 and import it through Question Library, Import, Upload a File. The questions are listed for review before anything commits.

If your source is a document rather than a recording, the same logic applies but a different tool fits: you can turn the document itself into a question set and skip the retyping. Either way, the questions are drafted from your own material, every one is editable before export, and there is no accuracy guarantee, so read the set once before it counts toward a grade.

How to choose in one pass

• Existing Word test banks, many instructors, Windows campus. Respondus 4, if your institution will fund the campus license.
• Existing questions, one instructor, occasional need. Convert to QTI 1.2 and use the Question Library importer. GETMARKED at $29 a year covers light document conversion.
• A small bank you are writing anyway. D2L's CSV template, free and native.
• No questions yet, and a recording that contains them. Generate first, convert second.
• Mixed Brightspace and Blackboard campus. Plan two exports. QTI 1.2 for Brightspace, tab-delimited for Blackboard, because Blackboard's QTI importer wants 2.1 and Original Course View.

Whichever route you take, the version and the importer are the two details worth confirming before you build the file. The Brightspace quiz converter page carries the full Question Library CSV spec, the type codes and every import route side by side, and what a QTI file is and how to import one explains why a package works where a loose XML file does not.