Moodle quiz maker: Moodle quiz generator and GIFT import from any video

Does Moodle import QTI?

No. A standard Moodle install ships no QTI importer. The question/format directory on the Moodle 4.5 and 5.0 stable branches holds exactly seven plugins and no more: aiken, blackboard_six, gift, missingword, multianswer (Embedded answers), xhtml and xml. Six of those import, xhtml is export only, and QTI is not among them. Older guides still list Examview and WebCT importers, which were dropped from core. You can confirm the list on your own site under Site administration, Plugins, Question formats.

This trips people up because QTI is a real standard and Canvas, Blackboard and Brightspace all read it, so it is easy to assume Moodle does too. Third party QTI plugins do exist and an administrator can install one, but you cannot count on it being there, and most instructors do not have the rights to add plugins anyway.

The practical consequence: if your quiz is going to Moodle, export GIFT. If the same quiz also has to go to Canvas or Blackboard, export QTI separately for those. VidQuiz generates the questions once and gives you both files, so the format is a decision you make at export time rather than a reason to write the quiz twice.

What is GIFT format in Moodle?

GIFT is Moodle's own plain text question format, designed so a teacher can write questions in a text editor. The question text comes first, the answers sit inside curly braces, a tilde marks a wrong answer and an equals sign marks the right one. A hash mark after an answer attaches feedback to that specific choice, and four hash marks attach general feedback shown after the attempt.

So a finished multiple choice item looks like the question, then a brace, then one line per option with the correct one flagged and its explanation written after a hash. True/false items take the literal words TRUE or FALSE. Short answer items list each accepted answer with an equals sign and no distractors at all.

The detail worth knowing before you hand write any of it: the characters tilde, equals, hash, colon and both curly braces are control characters, and any of them appearing in your actual question text has to be escaped with a backslash. A question about a 50% margin or a 12:04 timestamp will break the parse if it goes in raw. Our export escapes all of them for you, which is most of the reason a generated GIFT file imports first time and a hand written one often does not.

What does not survive the import into Moodle

Timestamps have nowhere native to go. Moodle has no field for the moment in a recording a question came from, so our export writes it into the general feedback line, which appears after the learner submits. That keeps the information rather than losing it, but if you would rather not show it, strip those lines before importing or delete the general feedback in the bank afterward.

Grade weighting is yours to set. GIFT lets an answer carry a percentage, but a generated quiz marks one answer fully correct and the rest wrong, which is what you want in almost every case. If you run partial credit, set it in the question bank after the import.

Images do not travel in a GIFT file. GIFT is plain text, so a question that needs a diagram has to have it added in the Moodle editor afterward. Since questions generated from spoken content are text questions, this rarely costs anything, but it is the reason Moodle XML exists for people who need media in the bank.

How do you create a quiz in Moodle from a video?

Four steps, and only one of them is slow. Paste a YouTube link to the recording, or upload the file with its transcript, and let the questions generate. Read through the draft and fix what is wrong, which is the step that actually needs you. Export GIFT. Import into the question bank and build the quiz activity from it.

The editing pass deserves honesty. Questions generated from a recording are a strong first draft, not a finished assessment. What usually needs attention is scope: a question written from a lecture tends to carry the lecturer's framing, so it tests recall of how something was said rather than whether the concept was understood. Rewriting three or four stems out of twenty is normal and it is still an order of magnitude faster than starting from an empty editor.

For a graded assessment rather than a practice check, treat the export as a draft the subject expert signs off on. The grid view makes that review easy to delegate, and the explanation attached to each answer is what lets a second reader tell quickly whether the key is right.

What videos can it build a Moodle quiz from?

Anything with spoken content. Recorded lectures and lecture capture, seminars, training and onboarding sessions, recorded webinars, product walkthroughs and screen recordings, conference talks, podcasts, and YouTube or Vimeo links all work the same way. Paste or upload, generate, edit, export.

Two honest limits. The input has to be video or audio, so a PDF reading or a slide deck is not a source VidQuiz reads. And the questions are a draft generated from your own recording with no accuracy guarantee, so the review before you import is a real step rather than a formality.