Import Questions into Canvas Quiz, Question Bank and Item Bank From Any Video

How to import quiz questions into Canvas (Classic Quizzes)

Open the course, click Settings in the course navigation, then Import Course Content on the right hand menu. Set Content Type to QTI .zip file, click Choose File and attach the package, choose the question bank the questions should go into or select Create new question bank and name it, then start the import and watch the queue until it reports complete.

The questions appear under Quizzes, in Manage Question Banks. From there you build the quiz itself and pull questions from the bank, either individually or as a question group that draws a set number at random from the pool. That last option is the reason importing a larger bank than you need is usually a good idea: forty questions in a bank can produce a twenty question quiz that differs for every student.

One option on the import screen is worth understanding before you tick it. Overwrite assessment content with matching IDs replaces existing questions that share an identifier with the incoming ones. Leave it off for a fresh import. Turn it on only when you are deliberately updating a bank you imported from the same source before, otherwise you risk quietly replacing questions you had edited by hand.

How to import questions into a New Quizzes item bank

From the course, open Item Banks, create a new bank or open an empty one, and use the import option to upload the QTI package. The questions land in the bank and any New Quizzes assessment in your courses can then pull from it. This is the route worth learning if you build more than one quiz a term, because an item bank is shared and a question you correct in the bank stays corrected everywhere it is used.

The other route puts the questions directly into one assessment. Create or open a New Quizzes assessment, go to the Build page, click the options icon at the top right and choose Import Content, then attach the QTI file and import. Faster for a one off, less useful later, because those questions live inside that quiz rather than in a bank you can reuse.

Which route you take matters more than it looks. Institutions that have already moved to New Quizzes generally want item banks, since Classic question banks do not carry across.

How to transfer question banks in Canvas

Within Classic Quizzes, question banks move without an export. Open Quizzes, choose Manage Question Banks, open the bank, and use the move or copy question option to send questions to another bank in any course you teach. Nothing leaves Canvas and no file is involved.

Moving a Classic question bank into a New Quizzes item bank is the harder case, because Canvas provides no direct one click migration for banks. The workaround most campus support teams document is indirect: build a Classic quiz that pulls the questions from the bank, migrate that quiz to New Quizzes, and the questions arrive in a single item bank you can then reorganize. It works, it is tedious, and it flattens whatever bank structure you had.

If you are generating fresh questions anyway, the migration problem disappears. A QTI package imported straight into an item bank skips the Classic side entirely.

Canvas import quiz from Word or a spreadsheet

Canvas will not do this natively. Neither a .docx nor a .csv nor an .xlsx of questions is something the importer recognizes, which is why searches for it turn up so many university help pages and third party tools rather than an official guide.

The practical options are all conversion steps. Some campuses run their own text to QTI converter for staff, the open source text2qti turns a specific plain text layout into a Canvas ready QTI package, and a handful of commercial tools transcode between question bank formats. Whatever you use, the output has to be a QTI zip before Canvas is involved.

Worth being direct here, because it saves people time: VidQuiz does not convert a Word file or a spreadsheet of existing questions. It reads video and audio and writes new questions from it. If what you have is a document full of questions you already wrote, use your campus converter or text2qti. If what you have is a recording and no questions yet, this is the tool for that.

Import a test bank into Canvas

Publisher test banks ship as QTI zips, usually one file per chapter, and they import through the same Settings, Import Course Content, QTI .zip file route. Import each chapter file separately and give each its own question bank so the chapter structure survives. Adding them all to one bank works but leaves you sorting hundreds of questions afterwards.

Two practical notes from how these imports usually go. Large publisher packages take a few minutes in the import queue and the page does not always refresh on its own, so give it time before assuming it failed. And question types Canvas does not support, or that were authored for a different platform, are skipped and reported in the import log rather than silently dropped, so read the log rather than counting questions by eye.

Canvas import quiz from another course

Use Settings, Import Course Content, and set Content Type to Copy a Canvas Course. Choose the source course, then either bring everything across or select specific content and tick only the quizzes and question banks you want. This is the cleanest way to reuse an assessment you built last term, and it carries quizzes and their banks together.

The alternative is an export and re-import: Settings, Export Course Content, choose Quizzes, and Canvas produces a QTI zip you can import into any Canvas course, including one at a different institution. That is also the route to take when the destination is not Canvas at all, because Blackboard Original, Brightspace and Sakai read the same package.

Why the import gets rejected

The commonest failure is uploading a loose .xml file rather than a zip. Canvas looks for an imsmanifest.xml at the root of the package before it reads anything else, so a bare assessment file has nothing telling the importer what it is looking at, and it is rejected without a message that explains the problem.

Second commonest is a zip that has an extra folder wrapping the contents, usually because the package was unzipped and rezipped on a Mac. The manifest has to sit at the root of the archive, not one level down. Third is uploading a package built for a different standard version. QTI 2.x and 3.0 exist, but support across Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace and Sakai is uneven, and QTI 1.2 is the version all four import most reliably.

Every VidQuiz export is a 1.2 package with the manifest at the root, so none of the three apply. If an import does fail, the import log in Canvas names the file and the question it stopped on, which is more useful than the on screen error.

What VidQuiz gives Canvas

A quiz written from your own video, with the correct answer marked, a one line explanation on every question, and a timestamp pointing at the moment in the recording the question tests. The explanation is what turns a graded quiz into something students learn from, and it survives the QTI import as per question feedback.

You review and edit everything before export, which matters because questions are generated from your material and come with no accuracy guarantee. Learners taking the quiz in Canvas need no VidQuiz account and are not counted against anything on your plan. The free plan is 3 quizzes a month with no card required, paid plans start at $19 a month, and the allowance is counted per video rather than per student.