By output · QTI converter

QTI converter: QTI file converter and QTI generator for Canvas, Brightspace and Sakai

Every other QTI converter reformats questions you have already written. This one writes them from the source material, then exports the QTI 1.2 package.

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

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The short answer

Last updated September 2026

A QTI converter turns questions into the packaged .zip that a learning management system will import. Almost every tool in this category is a reformatter: text2qti reads Markdown, GETMARKED Digitaliser reads DOCX and PDF, Respondus 4 reads Word and delimited files, and the converters US universities host for their own faculty read a CSV. All of them assume the questions already exist. VidQuiz starts a step earlier: paste a lecture link or the text of your material, it drafts the questions with the correct answer marked, and the QTI 1.2 export comes out as a .zip holding the assessment XML and an imsmanifest.xml. QTI 1.2 is what Canvas, Brightspace and Sakai read. Blackboard and Moodle do not, and this page says which file each one needs instead.

There are two completely different problems hiding behind the phrase QTI converter, and picking the wrong tool wastes an afternoon.

The first is a format problem. You have a hundred questions in a Word document, a spreadsheet or an old question bank, and Canvas will not look at any of them because the only external question format it reads is a QTI package. That is a reformatting job, and the tools built for it are genuinely good. text2qti is free and open source. Your own university may run a converter for faculty, which is why the search results for this term are full of pages from Kansas State, New York Tech and the University of the Incarnate Word rather than software companies.

The second problem is that the questions do not exist yet. You have a recorded lecture, a training session, a webinar or a chapter of material, and somebody still has to sit down and write forty items about it. No reformatter helps with that, because reformatters need input. This page is about the second problem: VidQuiz drafts the questions from the material, marks the correct answer, adds a short explanation and a timestamp back to the moment in the recording, and then exports the QTI 1.2 package your LMS imports. If you are holding finished questions, one of the reformatters below is the right answer and the table says which.

At a glance

What each QTI converter reads, writes and costs

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Tool	What it reads	What it writes	Price, read first-party September 2026
text2qti	Markdown based plain text files	QTI 1.2, built specifically for Canvas	Free, open source under BSD-3-Clause. Needs Python 3.10 or newer installed
GETMARKED Digitaliser	DOCX, PDF, Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, LMS question bank exports, quiz platform exports, QTI 1.2, QTI 2.1, QTI 2.2, GIFT, WebCT and Examview exported Blackboard pools	The same wide range of formats, in both directions	Basic $29 a year for 50 page credits. Personal $40 a year plus a $50 one-time license fee. Commercial and Institutional by quote
Respondus 4.0	Microsoft Word with images intact, rich text, QTI, and tab or comma delimited files	Publishes straight into Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace and Moodle, and writes QTI	Campus license by student FTE: $1,695 under 2,500 students rising to $2,945 at 30,001 to 40,000, renewing each August 1. Windows only. A single user license is sold online with no figure published on the pricing page
University hosted converters	Usually a CSV, sometimes formatted plain text	A Canvas ready QTI .zip	Free, and normally restricted to that institution. Kansas State, New York Tech and the University of the Incarnate Word all run one
Your LMS itself	Nothing. Questions are typed into the bank one at a time	Not applicable	Included, and it is the slowest option on this table by a wide margin
VidQuiz	A YouTube link read unaided, an uploaded recording with its transcript pasted alongside, or text pasted on its own	QTI 1.2 .zip, plus CSV, a Google Forms ready CSV, Moodle GIFT, a Blackboard tab delimited .txt and PDF	Free tier, then paid plans. It is the only row that writes the questions rather than converting existing ones

text2qti read first-party from its GitHub repository, GETMARKED and Respondus 4 read first-party from their own pricing pages, all on 10 September 2026. Respondus figures are for North America and are stated by Respondus as subject to change.

How do I import a QTI file into Canvas?

Through course Settings rather than through the quiz itself, which is the step that catches most people. Open the course, click Settings in the course navigation, choose Import Course Content on the right, set Content Type to QTI .zip file, browse for the package, choose the question bank the questions should land in or let Canvas create one, and start the import. Canvas shows a progress bar and the questions appear in the bank rather than as a finished quiz, so you build the quiz afterwards and pull questions from the bank.

New Quizzes works differently and the difference is not signposted anywhere in the interface. There you go to the Options menu, choose Manage Item Banks, create a bank, open it, use the Options icon inside the bank and choose Import Content. Reaching banks through the Item Banks button instead gives you a screen that looks identical and offers no import at all.

Generate a quiz above, download the QTI export, and the file is already in the shape that dialog expects: a .zip with the assessment XML and an imsmanifest.xml at the root, not a loose XML file.

Classic Quizzes: Settings, then Import Course Content, then QTI .zip file
New Quizzes: Options, then Manage Item Banks, then Import Content inside the bank
The New Quizzes bank must be empty or the import option is unavailable
Questions arrive in a bank, not as a ready made quiz
Upload the .zip, never the .xml on its own

How do I convert a CSV to QTI?

With a reformatter, and VidQuiz is not one. If you already hold questions in a spreadsheet, the tools built for that job are text2qti for Markdown style plain text, GETMARKED Digitaliser for DOCX and PDF, Respondus 4 for Word and delimited files, or the CSV converter your own university may publish for faculty. Several US institutions run one precisely because Canvas has no spreadsheet importer of its own.

We say that plainly because the alternative is wasting your time. VidQuiz reads a recording or written source material and drafts questions from it. Hand it a CSV of finished questions and there is nothing for it to do that you have not already done.

The case where this page helps is the opposite one: the spreadsheet is empty. If the reason you are looking at CSV to QTI workflows is that somebody has to write forty questions about a recorded session first, the writing is the expensive part, and that is the part this tool removes.

How do I convert a Word file to a QTI file?

Two tools do this well and they sit at opposite ends of the price range. GETMARKED Digitaliser reads DOCX and PDF directly and starts at $29 a year for 50 page credits, where one credit converts one page of a document. Respondus 4.0 imports Word with images intact, along with rich text and delimited files, but it is sold to institutions as a campus license priced by student FTE and it runs on Windows only, with no Mac build and no browser version.

One detail in the GETMARKED plan table is worth checking before you buy, because it runs backwards from what you would expect. Commercial use and non-teaching staff use, with instructional designer given as the example, are both allowed on the cheaper Basic plan and both marked not allowed on the more expensive Personal plan. The higher tier buys unlimited personal volume and gives up those rights.

Neither of them writes questions. If the Word document you are holding is lecture notes rather than a finished question list, converting it is not the job in front of you.

What is inside a QTI package, and why does my LMS reject it?

A QTI 1.2 package is a .zip containing at least two files: an assessment XML file holding the questions, and an imsmanifest.xml at the root of the archive that tells the importing system what is in the package and where. Nearly every rejected import comes down to one of three things. The manifest is missing, the archive was rebuilt in a way that buried both files inside an extra folder, or somebody uploaded the assessment XML on its own without zipping it.

The other failure mode is quieter and happens hours later. QTI is XML 1.0, and several byte values that are perfectly legal in UTF-8 and in JSON are illegal in XML, with no escape available. Text pasted out of a PDF carries them regularly. A package containing one of them parses as a valid file right up until the LMS refuses it, usually without naming the question that caused it.

What VidQuiz emits is a .zip holding the assessment XML in the ims_qtiasiv1p2 namespace and an imsmanifest.xml declaring a resource of type imsqti_xmlv1p2, with the illegal characters stripped before the file is written. Items go out as multiple choice or short answer, question text is plain text rather than HTML, and each item carries exactly one correct response, so nothing in the package can score two different answers as correct.

The archive root holds imsmanifest.xml, not a folder that holds it
Upload the .zip, not the assessment XML
Rezipping on a Mac can add a wrapper folder that breaks the manifest path
Control characters pasted from a PDF make valid UTF-8 that is invalid XML
One correct response per item, so the answer key cannot be ambiguous

Does Blackboard import QTI files?

Only in the Original Course View, and only QTI 2.1. This is the mistake that costs the most time in this whole category, because a QTI 1.2 package built for Canvas looks like the right kind of file and is not. Blackboard Ultra has no QTI import at all.

The route that works in both course views is the tab delimited .txt upload, which Blackboard calls Upload Questions. One question per row, tab separated, no header row, no blank lines, and each answer option followed by the literal word correct or incorrect. Anthology recommends keeping a batch under 250 records to avoid browser timeouts, which is a recommendation about your browser rather than a limit in the file format.

VidQuiz exports that .txt as well as QTI, so the same question set covers Blackboard and Canvas without a second tool. One thing does not survive the Blackboard format: it has no feedback column, so the explanations attached to each question are dropped on upload.

Is there a QTI converter for Moodle?

Not one you need, because Moodle does not read QTI. Core Moodle ships exactly seven question format plugins, and QTI is not among them: aiken, blackboard_six, gift, missingword, multianswer, xhtml and xml. Six of those import and xhtml is export only. There is no CSV, Excel or Word importer in core either.

GIFT is the format to send. It is plain text, it covers eight question types, and it is the only plain text option that carries per question feedback, which means the explanation written with each question survives the import instead of being discarded. Questions go in through the question bank rather than through a quiz, and you build the quiz from the bank afterwards.

VidQuiz writes GIFT alongside QTI, so a Moodle course and a Canvas course can be filled from the same generated set without converting anything twice.

Can a QTI converter write the questions for me?

The reformatters cannot, by design. text2qti, Respondus 4, GETMARKED Digitaliser and the campus CSV converters all take questions as input and change their shape. That is a real job and they do it well, but it means the hours spent composing items still happen somewhere, usually on a Sunday.

VidQuiz is the row on the table that starts before the questions exist. Paste a YouTube link and it reads the video itself, with no transcript needed. For a Vimeo link, an MP4, a Panopto or Kaltura recording or a file you upload, paste the transcript alongside it, because VidQuiz has no speech to text of its own and says so rather than failing three minutes into a job. There is also a paste mode that takes written material on its own, up to 60,000 characters, when the source is a chapter or a set of notes rather than a recording.

What comes back is a first draft that a human reviews, not a validated assessment instrument. Every question is editable before you export, which is the point at which most people fix two items and ship the rest. Exports are available once you have an account: the signed out preview runs the real generator but does not download files.

Spec

Which QTI version each platform actually imports

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Destination	Accepts QTI	Version	What to send instead when it does not
Canvas Classic Quizzes	Yes	QTI 1.2 and 2.x	Nothing else. Canvas has no native CSV, Excel or Word question importer, so QTI is the only external format it reads
Canvas New Quizzes item bank	Yes	QTI 1.2 and 2.x	Nothing else, and the bank has to be empty. Import Content disappears once the bank holds a single question
Brightspace Question Library	Yes	Up to QTI 1.2 only	A QTI 2.x package is refused here. The separate Course Import tool takes 2.x and 3.x, with a subset of features supported
Sakai	Yes	QTI 1.2	Nothing else needed
Blackboard Original Course View	Yes	QTI 2.1	A QTI 1.2 package built for Canvas is the wrong file. Use the tab delimited .txt upload instead
Blackboard Ultra Course View	No	None	The tab delimited .txt upload is the only question import route supported in Ultra
Moodle	No	None	Core Moodle ships no QTI importer at all. Send Moodle GIFT, which also carries the per question feedback
Google Forms and Microsoft Forms	No	None	Neither reads QTI. Google Forms takes a CSV through an Apps Script import, Microsoft Forms has a Quick Import that reads a document

Canvas and New Quizzes behaviour from Instructure Community documentation, Brightspace from D2L documentation and a D2L staff answer in the Brightspace Community, Blackboard from Anthology documentation, Moodle from the core question format plugin list. VidQuiz writes QTI 1.2.

What you get with qti converter

Written, not reformatted

Reformatters need questions as input. VidQuiz reads a lecture link, an uploaded recording with its transcript, or text you paste, and writes the items before any conversion happens.

A package, not a loose XML file

The export is a .zip holding the assessment XML and an imsmanifest.xml at the root. A bare .xml file is the single commonest reason an LMS rejects a QTI import.

QTI 1.2, which is the version that works

Canvas reads QTI 1.2 and 2.x, the Brightspace Question Library reads 1.2 only, and Sakai reads 1.2. Newer is not safer here, and the table below shows where 1.2 is the wrong file.

What you can do

Everything qti converter 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.

Turn a recorded lecture into a Canvas question bank
Fill a Brightspace Question Library from a training session
Build a QTI package when the questions have not been written yet
Get a marked answer key instead of setting each item by hand
Produce the same question set for several different platforms
Keep a copy of the questions outside any one LMS

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 qti converter

QTI 1.2 for Canvas, Brightspace and Sakai, and it is what VidQuiz writes. The Brightspace Question Library reads 1.2 only, so a 2.x package fails there. Blackboard Original is the exception that wants 2.1, and Blackboard Ultra and Moodle do not read QTI at all.

No, and that is a deliberate line. VidQuiz writes questions from a recording or from written source material, then exports QTI 1.2. To reformat questions that already exist, use text2qti, GETMARKED Digitaliser, Respondus 4 or the converter your institution publishes for faculty.

Usually because it is not a package. Canvas expects a .zip with an imsmanifest.xml at the archive root, so a loose assessment XML file, or a rezipped archive that buried the manifest inside an extra folder, both fail. Control characters pasted from a PDF are the other common cause, since they are valid UTF-8 but illegal in XML.

Yes. text2qti is free and open source under BSD-3-Clause and writes QTI 1.2 for Canvas, though it needs Python 3.10 or newer and reads a Markdown style plain text file. Several US universities also host free CSV to QTI converters, usually restricted to their own faculty.

A .zip holding the assessment XML in the ims_qtiasiv1p2 namespace and an imsmanifest.xml declaring a resource of type imsqti_xmlv1p2. Items are multiple choice or short answer, question text is plain text, and each item carries a single correct response so the answer key cannot be ambiguous.

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Every other QTI converter reformats questions you have already written. This one writes them from the source material, then exports the QTI 1.2 package. Make your first quiz in seconds.