Canvas Quiz Converter for New Quizzes Item Banks

A Canvas quiz converter for New Quizzes has to clear one specific bar: it must output a QTI package, because Instructure documents that a New Quizzes item bank only supports imports from QTI 1.2 and 2.x versions and accepts no other file at all. No Word document, no spreadsheet, no plain text goes in directly. That single rule eliminates most of the tools people try, and it is why so many US universities publish their own converter for faculty. The second question decides the rest of the shortlist: do the questions already exist, or do they still have to be written?

Below is what each option reads, what it produces for Canvas, what it costs and who it genuinely suits. Prices and format support were read from each vendor in September 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a figure, this article says so rather than repeating a number from a directory listing.

Canvas quiz converters compared

Tool	Takes as input	Outputs for Canvas	Price	Best for
VidQuiz	A YouTube link read directly; an uploaded recording with its transcript	QTI 1.2 zip, plus GIFT, Blackboard tab-delimited, Google Forms CSV, CSV, PDF	A one-off free demo of 3 quizzes, then $19, $39 or $99 a month	Item banks that do not exist yet, drafted from a lecture or training recording
text2qti	Plain text written in a Markdown-like syntax	QTI 1.2 package, designed specifically for Canvas	Free, open source, BSD-3-Clause	Anyone comfortable installing Python 3.10 and running a command
GETMARKED Digitaliser	DOCX, PDF, QTI 1.2, 2.1 and 2.2, GIFT, and question banks pulled from other LMS platforms	Canvas import, among about twenty other targets	Basic $29 a year for 50 page credits; Personal $40 a year plus a $50 one-time license fee	Reformatting documents and banks you already hold, at small volume
Respondus 4.0	MS Word, rich text, QTI, tab or comma delimited	Publishes directly into Canvas without a manual import step	Campus license $1,695 to $2,945 a year by student FTE, as read in August 2026. Single-user price unpublished	Departments whose campus already holds the license and has Word test banks
Canvas Classic round trip	An existing Classic Quizzes question bank	A QTI export Canvas writes itself, re-imported into an empty item bank	Free, built into Canvas	Moving a bank you already built, if you accept nine manual steps
Cognero	A publisher test bank tied to an adopted Cengage title	File, then Export, then QTI for Canvas	Bundled with the textbook adoption	Instructors teaching from a Cengage title with a supplied test bank
In-house campus converters	Plain text or CSV, varying by institution	QTI for Canvas	Free to that institution's own staff	Faculty whose university already runs one, such as NYIT, K-State or Prairie View A&M

Read that table by the input column first, not by price. Six of the seven only reformat questions that already exist somewhere. That is the distinction that actually decides which tool is right, and it is the one comparison articles usually blur by ranking everything on cost.

Which QTI version does a Canvas New Quizzes item bank accept?

QTI 1.2 and 2.x, and Instructure states it in exactly those terms. That is worth saying plainly, because several converters market QTI 2.1 as the more modern output and it is easy to assume 1.2 is too old to be accepted. It is not. A 1.2 package sits comfortably inside the supported range, which is why both text2qti and VidQuiz target it.

Instructure attaches one caveat that applies to both versions: some QTI 1.2 and 2.x third-party packages include software-specific item types which may not be supported. In practice that means an exotic item type invented by whichever tool wrote the package, not the ordinary multiple choice and short answer items. If a package fails to import cleanly, the question types inside it are the first thing to check, not the version number.

This is also where Canvas and Blackboard part company, which trips up anyone administering both. Anthology documents its QTI importer for QTI 2.1 packages in the Original Course View, so one file cannot serve both platforms. On a mixed campus, plan on two exports rather than one, and see our QTI file generator page for what is actually inside a package and why Canvas rejects some of them.

Why will my item bank not let me import?

Almost always one of two documented reasons, and neither of them is a permissions problem. The first is that the bank already holds questions. Instructure states that if there are questions in your item bank, you will not be able to select the Import Content option. The menu entry stays visible while being unselectable, which is what makes it read like a bug.

The second is the route you took to get there. Instructure documents that you can only import questions if you access item banks from the Manage Item Banks page in the Options menu, and that if you click the Item Banks button you will not be able to import questions. Two entry points, near-identical screens, and only one of them carries an import. Between them these two rules account for most of the reports that Canvas quiz import is broken.

The practical habit is one fresh, empty bank per import, merged afterwards, rather than topping up a bank you have been adding to by hand.

Can I convert a Classic question bank into a New Quizzes item bank?

Not directly, and this is the single biggest surprise in the transition. Florida State University Canvas Support, in guidance last revised in April 2026, states that Canvas currently does not have a way to migrate a Classic Quizzes question bank to a New Quizzes item bank, that it is a requested feature engineers are working on, and that no timeframe has been published.

The workaround is a round trip. You build a throwaway Classic quiz, pull the whole bank into it with Find Questions and Select All, save, then export that quiz as QTI from course Settings, download the file, create an empty item bank and import the file into it. Two details save you a second attempt: the title of the throwaway Classic quiz becomes the title of the item bank, and the temporary name you gave the empty bank is overwritten during the import.

It is worth the clicking for a bank that took years to assemble. For a course where the recordings exist but the bank does not, it is a lot of steps to move questions you would rather rewrite from scratch.

Is there a free Canvas quiz converter?

Yes, three of them, with real limits attached. text2qti is free and open source under a BSD-3-Clause license, writes QTI 1.2, and was designed specifically for Canvas. The catch is that you write the questions in its Markdown-like plain text syntax first, and you need Python 3.10 or newer installed. There is a small graphical wrapper, so it is not strictly a command-line tool, but the install step alone rules it out for a lot of faculty.

The Classic round trip described above is free and needs nothing installed, but only helps if the questions are already in a Canvas question bank. And a number of US universities host their own converter for their own staff, including New York Institute of Technology, Kansas State and Prairie View A&M. Those are excellent if you happen to work there and useless otherwise, which is a reasonable summary of why this category exists at all.

Which converter works for an instructional designer?

This is where licence terms matter more than price, and GETMARKED Digitaliser hides a genuine trap in plain sight. Its published plan comparison has a row for commercial use and a row headed non-teaching staff use, with an instructional designer given as the example. Both rows read Allowed on the $29 Basic plan and Not allowed on the $40 Personal plan. Paying more buys volume and takes away rights.

So an instructional designer building banks on behalf of a department belongs on Basic, capped at 50 page credits a year, or on the custom-priced Commercial and Institutional plan, and specifically not on the unlimited-sounding Personal tier. Neither of the two cheap plans permits sharing. It is the most expensive thirty seconds of reading in their pricing table, and buying the wrong one of the two is an easy mistake to make. Respondus 4.0 is the usual institutional answer, though it runs on Windows 11 or 10 only with no Mac build and no browser version, which is a genuine constraint on a Mac-heavy campus. We cover the trade-off in more detail on our Respondus 4.0 alternative page, including the FTE pricing bands.

What if the questions do not exist yet?

Then a converter is the wrong category entirely, and this is the honest limit of every tool in the table above except one. Converters move questions. They do not write them. If you are staring at a fresh item bank for a course that has recordings but no test bank, the slow part of your afternoon is composing fifty stems, two hundred distractors and fifty answer keys, and no amount of format conversion touches that.

That is the job VidQuiz does. Paste the link to the lecture, training session or webinar the assessment is meant to cover, and it writes the questions from the recording itself: four options each, the correct one marked, a one-line explanation, and a timestamp back to the moment the answer came from. The QTI 1.2 package that comes out is what an empty item bank imports. The Canvas New Quizzes generator page walks through the whole path, and importing questions into Canvas covers the Classic Quizzes side, where the import runs through course Settings instead.

One boundary worth stating clearly, because it decides whether we are any use to you: VidQuiz reads recordings, not documents. If what you are actually holding is a lecture handout or a chapter PDF and you want questions out of it, that is a different tool and you want something that turns the document itself into a question set. If what you have is an hour of recorded teaching, this is the shorter road.

The short version

A New Quizzes item bank takes QTI 1.2 or 2.x and nothing else, it has to be empty before it will accept an import, and the import lives on the Manage Item Banks page rather than behind the Item Banks button. There is still no automatic path from a Classic question bank to an item bank. Pick a converter by what you are holding: text2qti if you will write plain text and can install Python, GETMARKED for documents at small volume on a licence that permits your use, Respondus if your campus already pays for it, and something that drafts the questions if the bank is empty because the work has not been done yet. For the wider picture across platforms, our quiz converter page lists which file each major LMS actually imports.