How to Create a Kaltura Video Quiz (And Where Results Go)

The short answer

To create a Kaltura video quiz, open the entry in My Media, launch the quiz editor from the Actions or Edit menu, move along the timeline to the point where a question belongs, and add it. Kaltura supports four question types: multiple choice, true/false, open-ended, and reflection points. Playback pauses at each question so the viewer has to respond before continuing. Results live in the entry analytics under the Quiz Users and Quiz Questions tabs, and a quiz assigned through an LMS reports its score to the gradebook automatically once the student submits.

Two details decide whether the quiz actually works for grading. Only multiple choice and true/false are auto-graded, so a quiz built on open-ended questions gives you nothing to score at scale. And Kaltura holds the quiz in a browser session that expires after four hours by default, so a student who leaves the quiz open overnight can submit and still have the grade never reach the gradebook.

What is a Kaltura video quiz?

It is a set of questions embedded at specific moments inside a Kaltura video rather than attached to the end of it. The viewer watches, the player stops at a timestamp you chose, and a question appears. They answer, and playback resumes. Because the questions sit at the moments they test, you find out whether someone understood minute 12 at minute 12, instead of discovering at the end that they drifted off early.

The quiz runs in Kaltura's v7 player, so it works the same way in MediaSpace, a Content Hub, and the Kaltura tool inside an LMS. One constraint worth knowing before you plan a video: an entry cannot contain both a quiz and hotspots at the same time, so you pick one interactive layer per video.

How to create a Kaltura video quiz, step by step

The mechanics take about ten minutes to learn:

1. Go to My Media and find the entry you want to turn into a quiz. If the video is not uploaded yet, upload or record it first.
2. Open the quiz editor from the entry's Actions menu (in most deployments this is Edit, then the Quiz tab, or Launch Editor).
3. Set the quiz options before you start writing: whether viewers can skip questions, whether they can replay sections, whether hints and correct answers are shown, and whether they can retake the quiz.
4. Scrub the timeline to the moment a question belongs and add the question there. Type the stem, add the answer options, and mark the correct one.
5. Repeat for each question. A fifty minute lecture usually wants eight to twelve.
6. Save, then publish or assign the entry. If it needs to be graded, it has to be assigned through your LMS, not just shared as a link.

None of that is hard. The cost is the writing. Every question means watching the section back, deciding what is worth testing, writing the stem, and inventing three wrong answers that are not obviously wrong. Across a term of recorded lectures, that is days of work nobody put on a schedule, which is why so many recordings end up with no quiz at all.

Which question types should you use?

Kaltura gives you four, and they behave very differently once you need a score:

Question type	Auto-graded?	Best for
Multiple choice	Yes	Almost everything. One correct answer and up to four options by default
True/False	Yes	A quick check on one clear rule. True is preselected as correct
Open-ended	No	Reflection and short written responses. The owner reviews and scores each one by hand
Reflection point	No	A prompt with no answer, used to make a point land

Open-ended questions cap at 400 characters for the question and 250 for the answer, and they must be answered before the quiz can be submitted. They are not auto-graded: the quiz owner reads each response, scores it manually, and can leave a comment. That is fine for a seminar of fifteen. It does not survive a cohort of three hundred.

If the score has to count for something, build the quiz on multiple choice. It grades itself, it is unambiguous when a student disputes a mark, and it is the only type that answers the question you actually care about at scale, which is whether the cohort understood the material.

Where do you find Kaltura quiz results?

In the entry analytics for the video. Open My Media, click the three dots next to the media, and choose Analytics. Quiz analytics requires the Userreports module to be enabled, so if you see no tabs at all, that is a question for whoever administers your Kaltura instance rather than something you can fix yourself.

Tab	What it shows	Exports
Quiz Users	Each user, their attempt number, and their final score	Export All Attempts (CSV) or Export Last Attempt (CSV)
Quiz Questions	How everyone answered each question, expandable per question	Export to CSV or a printable version, per question

The Quiz Questions view is the one to check when a question performs strangely. If ninety percent of the cohort picked the same wrong answer, the question is usually the problem, not the cohort. It is also where you read open-ended responses and add notes back to them.

When multiple attempts are allowed, the final score follows whatever scoring rule the quiz was set to: Highest, Latest, First, Lowest, or Average Attempt. The rule in force is shown in parentheses in the analytics, which is worth checking before you argue with a student about a grade.

Two limits catch people out. The attempts list loads up to 500 at a time behind a Show More button, so a large cohort takes several clicks to pull in full. And every viewer who is not logged in is collapsed into a single anonymous user, which means an openly shared video gives you essentially nothing at the individual level. For anything gradable, the video has to be assigned through the LMS.

How do Kaltura quizzes work in Canvas?

A quiz assigned through Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle, or Sakai syncs its score to the gradebook automatically when the student submits. The analytics gain a Status column showing whether each score reported successfully or errored, which is the first place to look when a grade goes missing.

The failure mode is a session timeout. Kaltura's default session expiration for long videos is four hours (14,400 seconds), and for videos longer than two hours the session lasts the video length multiplied by two. If a student opens the quiz, walks away, and finishes it the next morning, the browser session may have expired and the grade may never sync. Switching browsers or devices mid quiz does the same thing, and so does clearing cookies.

There are two honest ways to handle it. The first is procedural: tell students to complete the quiz in one sitting on one device, and check the gradebook for Error statuses after every deadline. The second is structural: stop routing the grade through the video player at all. Export the questions as a QTI package and import them as a native Canvas quiz, and Canvas owns the attempt, the timing, and the grade, with no session to expire. Our guide to the QTI file generator covers what that package contains and how Canvas quiz imports handle it.

Kaltura vs Panopto for video quizzing

The two platforms sit in the same part of the stack and the quizzing gap between them is smaller than most comparisons suggest. Both let you place questions at timestamps, both pause playback, both report to an LMS gradebook, and both make you type every single question yourself. Panopto's native types are multiple choice, true/false, multi-select, and fill in the blank; Kaltura's are multiple choice, true/false, open-ended, and reflection points. If you are weighing the two on quizzing alone, the deciding factor is usually reporting granularity rather than the editor, and we cover Panopto's side of that in the Panopto quiz generator guide.

What neither platform does is write the questions. That is the part that takes the time, and it is the same problem on both.

The faster way to get the questions written

Leave the interactive layer to Kaltura and stop authoring items from a blank box. Paste a link to the recording or upload the file to a Kaltura quiz generator, and you get a full multiple choice set drawn from what was actually said in the video, with the correct answer marked and a one line explanation of why it is right.

Every question carries a timestamp back to the moment it tests. That is the detail that makes the handoff clean: the timestamp tells you exactly where on the Kaltura timeline the question belongs, so you paste and place rather than scrubbing back and forth hunting for the moment again. The same set exports as a QTI package for a native Canvas quiz, as a Google Forms ready CSV, or as a PDF, so you are not locked into delivering it inside the player.

Review before it counts. The questions come from your own recording and they are a strong first draft rather than a guarantee, so read them once and fix anything that misreads a point you made. What disappears is the typing, and that is the step that decides whether a recording gets a quiz at all. The same approach works for any lecture recording turned into a quiz, regardless of which platform hosts it.

One more thing worth planning for as the library grows: a department that records every session accumulates hundreds of hours within a couple of terms, and finding the recording that covers a specific topic becomes its own problem. Teams increasingly put a searchable answer layer over that archive so the material stays usable after the term it was recorded for. Quizzes help here too, because a question set is a compact, skimmable index of what a recording actually covered.