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Canvas New Quizzes generator: item bank import, question bank conversion and QTI 1.2

A New Quizzes item bank imports one thing: a QTI package. Generate the questions from your recording and the package comes out ready.

Sample quiz

Saved output. Run your own video free on the home page

What VidQuiz reads: paste a YouTube link and VidQuiz watches the video itself. For any other source (Vimeo, an MP4, a screen recording, an upload) paste that video’s transcript and VidQuiz writes the questions from it.

See how it works

Questions from your video · answers and explanations · edit before you share

Free demo: 3 quizzes, one time, no card needed

The short answer

Last updated September 2026

A Canvas New Quizzes generator writes the questions and hands you a file the item bank will actually take. Instructure documents that New Quizzes only supports imports from QTI 1.2 and 2.x versions, and VidQuiz exports QTI 1.2, so a package built from your own recording imports straight into an item bank. Two documented rules catch nearly everyone: the import option lives on the Manage Item Banks page in the Options menu rather than behind the Item Banks button, and the bank has to be empty, because Import Content becomes unavailable the moment a bank holds a question. Canvas still has no direct migration from a Classic Quizzes question bank to a New Quizzes item bank.

The move to New Quizzes breaks a habit rather than a feature. Everything an instructor built up in Classic Quizzes lives in question banks, New Quizzes reads item banks instead, and the two are not interchangeable. Nobody announces that. You find it the first time you open a New Quizzes assessment, click to pull in the bank you have used for four semesters, and it is not on the list.

What makes it expensive is that Canvas has no button to move one across. Florida State University Canvas Support puts it plainly in guidance last revised in April 2026: Canvas currently does not have a way to migrate a Classic Quizzes question bank to a New Quizzes item bank, it is a requested feature engineers are working on, and there is no published timeframe. The workaround is a nine step round trip through a throwaway Classic quiz and a course export.

So the practical question is not how to move the old bank. It is what the fastest honest way to fill a new one is. An item bank takes exactly one kind of file, a QTI package, and paste the link to the lecture or training session the assessment covers and VidQuiz writes the questions from it: four options each, the correct one marked, a short explanation, and a timestamp back to the moment in the recording the answer came from. The QTI 1.2 zip that comes out is what the empty bank imports.

At a glance

Every route into a New Quizzes item bank

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Route	What it reads	Ships with Canvas	What it is actually for
Item bank editor	Nothing, typed by hand	Yes	Authoring one item at a time inside the bank. The only route in Canvas itself that creates new items from scratch
QTI package import	A .zip in QTI 1.2 or 2.x	Yes	The only file import an item bank accepts. Instructure warns that some third-party packages carry software-specific item types New Quizzes will not take
Classic quiz round trip	A QTI export Canvas wrote itself	Yes	The manual workaround for bringing a Classic question bank across. Nine steps, and the throwaway Classic quiz title becomes the item bank name
Course copy and Commons	A Canvas course package	Yes	Moves banks between your own Canvas courses. Not a route for questions written anywhere else
Third-party converter	Word, plain text or a spreadsheet, depending on the tool	No	Reformats questions that already exist into QTI. It does not write them, so the afternoon of composing still has to happen somewhere
VidQuiz	A video link, or an uploaded recording with its transcript	No	Writes the questions from the recording, then exports the QTI 1.2 package an empty item bank imports

Routes and their limits read first-party from Instructure Community documentation in September 2026. The Classic round trip is documented step by step by Florida State University Canvas Support, last revised April 2026.

How do I import questions from a QTI package into an item bank in New Quizzes?

You create the bank first, then import into it while it is still empty. From the Options menu choose Manage Item Banks, select Bank, give it a name, tick the Share checkbox if the bank should be available to the current course, and create it. Open the new bank, click the Options icon inside it, choose Import Content, then drag the QTI zip in or browse for it and start the import. A status bar reports progress.

The step people skip is the first one. Instructure states that you can only import questions if you reach 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. Both routes open something that looks like the same screen, and only one of them carries the import.

Generate the package above, download the QTI export, and the file is ready for that dialog. It arrives as a zip holding the assessment XML and an IMS manifest, which is the shape Canvas expects rather than a loose XML file.

Options menu, then Manage Item Banks, not the Item Banks button
Create the bank and leave it empty
Open the bank, Options icon, Import Content
Drag in the QTI zip, then click Import
Watch the status bar rather than refreshing the page

How do I convert a Classic question bank to a New Quizzes item bank?

Through a throwaway Classic quiz, because there is no direct conversion. You make a new Classic quiz, use Find Questions to pull in the whole bank with Select All, add them and save. Then you go to course Settings, Export Course Content, choose Quiz as the export type, pick that quiz, create the export and download the QTI file it produces. Finally you create an empty item bank, open it and import the file you just downloaded.

Two details save a second attempt. The title of the throwaway Classic quiz becomes the title of the item bank, so name it descriptively rather than calling it test, and the temporary name you gave the empty bank is replaced during the import. Florida State University Canvas Support documents this sequence for its own faculty and states that Canvas has no way to migrate a question bank to an item bank directly, that engineers are working on it, and that no timeframe has been published.

It works, and it is worth doing for a bank that took years to build. For a course where the recordings exist but the bank does not, the round trip is a lot of clicking to move questions you would rather rewrite anyway. Generating a fresh set from the lecture takes the same afternoon and produces items with explanations and timestamps attached.

What is the difference between question banks and item banks in Canvas?

They are the same idea attached to two different quiz engines. Question banks belong to Classic Quizzes, item banks belong to New Quizzes, and neither engine can read the other type. That is the whole of it, and it is why a bank you have used for years disappears from the picker the moment a course switches engines.

The practical differences show up around them rather than inside them. Item banks are reached from the course navigation or the Options menu, they can be shared to a course at the moment you create them, and they refuse an import once they hold a question. Question banks live under course Settings and accept content through the general course import, which is a more forgiving path.

Vocabulary matters here because the two names are so close that search results mix them freely. If a guide tells you to open Settings and Import Course Content, it is describing a Classic question bank even when the title says New Quizzes.

Why is Import Content greyed out in my item bank?

Because the bank is not empty. Instructure documents the rule directly: if there are questions in your item bank, you will not be able to select the Import Content option. The menu entry is still visible, which is what makes it read like a permissions problem or a broken page rather than a deliberate limit.

The fix is to import into a bank created for that purpose and merge afterwards, rather than topping up a bank you have been adding to by hand. If you are loading questions across several sessions, plan one bank per import and move items between banks later, which New Quizzes does allow.

The other version of this problem is reaching the bank through the Item Banks button, where Import Content never appears at all. Check which route you took before assuming the bank is at fault.

Does New Quizzes support QTI 1.2?

Yes. The documented range is QTI 1.2 and 2.x versions, so a 1.2 package is inside what New Quizzes reads. That is worth stating plainly because a number of converters advertise QTI 2.1 as the more modern choice and it is easy to assume 1.2 is too old to work.

Instructure attaches one caveat 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 item type invented by the tool that wrote the package, not the standard multiple choice and short answer items. A package built from plain multiple choice questions is the safe end of that range.

VidQuiz writes QTI 1.2 with multiple choice items and the correct response marked, which is why the export lands as a normal item bank rather than a set of questions Canvas cannot score.

When are Classic Quizzes going away?

No date has been published. Instructure removed the June 2024 transition deadline in October 2022 and has said it will not set a retirement date until the majority of Canvas users have moved to New Quizzes voluntarily. Classic Quizzes will be retired eventually, but the hard deadline that many transition guides still quote no longer exists.

That matters for planning in a way most people get backwards. There is no external clock forcing a rushed migration, so the decision sits with your institution, and many set their own dates well ahead of Instructure. Check what your own teaching and learning team has published rather than what a dated blog post says.

It also means the item bank you build now is the one you keep. Since a New Quizzes bank cannot be read back by Classic Quizzes, anything you author in the new engine is a one way move, which is a good reason to build it from a source you can regenerate rather than from a document that lives on one laptop.

Can I import an Excel or CSV file into a New Quizzes item bank?

Not directly. QTI is the only file format the item bank import accepts, so a spreadsheet has to become a QTI package before Canvas will look at it. This is the gap that university help desks fill with in-house converters, and it is why several US institutions publish their own quiz converter tools for faculty.

If your questions already exist in a spreadsheet or a Word document, one of those converters is the right tool and we say so plainly. VidQuiz does not read a spreadsheet of questions. It reads the recording the questions are meant to test, which is a different job.

The choice comes down to what you are holding. Questions already written need a reformatter. A recorded lecture, training session or webinar with no questions yet needs something that writes them, and that is the case this page is for.

Spec

Question bank or item bank: what actually changes

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Behaviour	Classic Quizzes question bank	New Quizzes item bank
Which engine can use it	Classic Quizzes only	New Quizzes only. The two bank types are not interchangeable
Direct migration between them	Not available	Not available. Listed as a requested feature in progress, with no published timeframe
File import formats	QTI packages and the Canvas quiz formats	QTI 1.2 and 2.x only
Where the import lives	Course Settings, then Import Course Content	The Manage Item Banks page in the Options menu. The Item Banks button cannot import
Import into a bank that already holds questions	Allowed	Blocked. Import Content is unavailable once the bank holds a single question
What VidQuiz gives you for it	A QTI 1.2 package, imported through Course Settings	The same QTI 1.2 package, imported into an empty bank

Read from Instructure Community item bank and QTI import documentation, September 2026. VidQuiz writes QTI 1.2, which sits inside the range New Quizzes accepts.

What you get with canvas new quizzes

The file the bank accepts

New Quizzes takes QTI 1.2 and 2.x and nothing else. VidQuiz writes QTI 1.2 as a zip with its manifest, which is the format an empty item bank imports without a converter in between.

Written, not reformatted

Every other route into an item bank moves questions that already exist. This one drafts them from the recording your assessment is based on, with the correct option already marked.

One set, several destinations

The same questions also export as CSV, PDF, GIFT or a Google Forms quiz, so a bank you build now is not trapped inside one LMS engine.

What you can do

Everything canvas new quizzes generator gives you

Paste a YouTube link and VidQuiz reads the video itself; for anything else, upload it with its transcript. Either way it writes the questions and you edit anything before you share. You stay in control of the final quiz.

Fill a fresh New Quizzes item bank from a recorded lecture
Stock a bank for a course that has just switched engines
Build an item bank without a Classic quiz round trip
Get a marked answer key instead of setting one item by item
Write end of module checks across several recorded sessions
Keep a copy of the questions outside Canvas

Quiz Studio

Try it on a video right here

Pick a sample or paste your own link, generate the quiz, then answer the questions. Each one is tied to a moment in the video, with the answer and a short explanation.

Sample quiz

Saved output. Run your own video free on the home page

Good questions

Questions about canvas new quizzes

QTI 1.2 and 2.x. Instructure adds that some third-party packages in either version carry software-specific item types New Quizzes will not support, so a package built from standard multiple choice items is the reliable end of the range. VidQuiz exports QTI 1.2.

No. Canvas has no direct migration between the two bank types. It is a requested feature engineers are working on with no published timeframe, so the current path is a manual round trip: build a throwaway Classic quiz from the bank, export it as QTI, then import that file into an empty item bank.

Either the bank already holds questions, which makes Import Content unavailable, or you reached the bank through the Item Banks button instead of the Manage Item Banks page in the Options menu. Only the Manage Item Banks route offers an import at all.

Not a published one. Instructure dropped the June 2024 deadline in October 2022 and has said it will not set a retirement date until most institutions have switched voluntarily. Individual universities still set their own internal deadlines, so the date that binds you is usually a local one.

A QTI 1.2 zip containing the assessment XML and an IMS manifest, with multiple choice items, the correct option marked and a short explanation on each question. You import it into an empty item bank, then build New Quizzes assessments that draw from that bank as normal.

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A New Quizzes item bank imports one thing: a QTI package. Generate the questions from your recording and the package comes out ready. Make your first quiz in seconds.