Import Questions into Moodle: Question Bank Import from Excel, CSV, Word or Any Video

How do I import questions into a Moodle question bank?

Open the course, go to the question bank, and choose Import from the bank menu. Pick the file format that matches your file, choose the category the questions should land in, drag the file into the file picker, then click Import. Moodle parses the file, shows you the questions it found, and you confirm. The questions appear in the category you chose.

The category choice matters more than it looks. Questions imported into the wrong category are tedious to find later, especially in a bank shared across a department, and Moodle will happily import several hundred questions into whatever category happened to be selected. Make the category before you import, name it after the source material, and the bank stays navigable a year from now.

Only after the import do you build the quiz. Add a Quiz activity, open its questions screen, and add questions from the bank, either by picking them or by adding a random question that draws from the category. The random draw is the reason to keep categories tight: a category that matches one topic gives you a quiz that samples that topic evenly.

Does Moodle import CSV files?

No. CSV is not one of the seven question formats core Moodle ships, so there is no CSV option on the import screen. This trips people up because CSV is the lingua franca almost everywhere else, and because Moodle does use CSV elsewhere in the product, for bulk user upload and for grade import, which makes it reasonable to assume questions work the same way.

They do not. The nearest equivalent is Aiken, which is as close to a plain text CSV as a question format gets: one question per block, one option per line, an ANSWER line at the end. If your CSV holds simple multiple choice items with a single correct answer, Aiken is the target to convert to. If it holds anything richer, matching pairs, numerical tolerances, or feedback text you want to keep, GIFT is the target instead because Aiken silently drops all of it.

What format does Moodle use to import questions?

Moodle XML is the native one and the safest default when the file is coming out of another Moodle site, because it is the only format that carries every question type without loss. GIFT is the one to pick when a human has to read or edit the file, and it covers eight question types including matching, numerical and essay.

Aiken is the simplest and the most limited: multiple choice, one correct answer, nothing else. The remaining three, Embedded answers, Missing word and Blackboard, are narrow tools for one job each, and none of them can be exported back out of Moodle.

For a bank you plan to move between courses or between institutions, export as Moodle XML and keep that as the archive copy. For a bank you plan to edit, keep GIFT. Teams that keep only the Aiken copy discover the loss later, when the feedback and the point values they spent an afternoon adding are not in the file.

How do I import questions into Moodle from Word?

Core Moodle cannot read a Word document. The usual route is Moodle2Word, a third party plugin that adds a Word import and export option to the question bank, but it has to be installed by whoever administers the site, which in most universities means a ticket and a wait. It is not something an instructor can enable on their own.

If the plugin is not available, the quickest path is to save the Word file as plain text and reshape it into Aiken or GIFT. Word questions are usually already close to Aiken layout, a question line followed by lettered options, so most of the work is normalising the option markers to a letter, then a bracket or a period, then a space, and adding the ANSWER line. Watch for smart quotes and en dashes that Word inserts automatically, because Aiken requires a UTF-8 file and typographic characters pasted from Word are a common cause of an import that fails without a clear reason.

What is Aiken format in Moodle?

Aiken is a deliberately minimal plain text format for multiple choice questions. The question text sits on one line, each option on its own line starting with a capital letter followed by a bracket or a period and a space, and a final line reading ANSWER: followed by the letter of the correct option. That is the whole specification.

The constraints are worth knowing before you commit to it. Aiken produces multiple choice questions and nothing else. It supports exactly one correct answer per question. It carries no feedback, no point values and no images. Each question needs at least two options or Moodle rejects that question and keeps going. The file must be UTF-8, and Moodle validates that on upload rather than failing halfway through.

A worked example is six lines long and is the entire format: a first line reading "Which port does HTTPS use by default?", then four option lines reading "A) 21", "B) 80", "C) 443" and "D) 8080", then a last line reading "ANSWER: C". Repeat the block, separated by a blank line, for every question in the file.

Use Aiken when the questions are simple and you want a file a colleague can edit in Notepad. Use GIFT the moment you need feedback, weighting or a second question type.

Can I import a question bank from another Moodle course?

Yes, and it does not need a file at all. Moodle question banks can be shared upward: a bank stored in a category above the course is visible to every course underneath it, so a department can maintain one bank that all its courses draw from. That is the cleanest answer when the two courses live on the same Moodle site.

When they do not, export the bank from the source course as Moodle XML and import that file into the target. Moodle XML is the right choice here specifically because it is lossless, and a cross site move is exactly the case where losing point values or per option feedback hurts most. The course backup and restore route also carries questions, but it brings the whole course with it, which is more than you usually want.

Does Moodle import QTI files?

Core Moodle does not. QTI is the format Canvas, Blackboard Original, Brightspace and Sakai use to move question banks around, so it feels like it ought to be universal, and Moodle is the notable holdout. There are community plugins that add QTI import, but again they are a site level install rather than something an instructor can turn on.

The one QTI shaped exception is the Blackboard format plugin, which reads a Blackboard 6 and later export. That covers a specific migration and nothing broader. If you are moving a bank out of Canvas and into Moodle, the reliable path is to export from Canvas as QTI, convert to GIFT or Moodle XML, then import. If you are generating the questions fresh, skip the detour and export GIFT directly.