Easy Tool to Convert Test Questions to Brightspace

You’ve always given paper hard copy tests and now your expected to put those hundreds of questions into Brightspace. Sounds daunting doesn’t it? It doesn’t help that the Brightspace CSV import file is NOT user friendly 😨

Well thanks to a handy-dandy question generator tool from Algonquin College, we can skip retyping and spreadsheet formatting. Whew! Tech to the rescue. We’ll show you exactly how to use this tool to convert your text editor copies of tests and assessments to a file for Brightspace.

Intro to the question library

We are going to convert these questions to be uploaded into the Brightspace question library. Not familiar with the question library? You should jump over to our post about the basics.

Intro to Test/Quiz Question Generator from Algonquin College

This publicly available tool from Algonquin College allows you to easily convert your test files for upload to Brightspace. You’ll just follow these easy steps:

• Do minimum reformatting of your assessment questions in a text editor
• Copy and paste the questions into the question generator
• Fix any highlighted formatting issues
• Download the questions file
• Import the questions file into Brightspace question library
• Tweak grading options, hints, and feedback for your questions

Algonquin College has great documentation for this tool but we’re still going to walk through the steps.

Currently the question generator only takes

• Multiple choice
• Multiple answer (Multi-select)
• True/False
• Essay/Written Response
• Fill in the blank
• Matching
• Ordering

Unfortunately, this generator is not compatible with Multi-short answer, Arithmetic, Significant figures, or Likert questions. You will have to enter those manually.

Reformatting assessment questions in your text editor

We’ll walk through the formatting required for generating an assessment question file for Brightspace. The formatting is very specific because the tool is taking this text version and generating a CSV spreadsheet file automatically. But the reformatting sure beats retyping or copy/pasting every question!

You can find a PDF version of Question Types & Formatting from Algonquin College here.

Generating and uploading the Brightspace file

We’ve formatted all our assessment questions so now we’re going to walk through using the Test/Quiz Question Generator and uploading your file to Brightspace.

Now you’re all set! The questions are ready to from your question library to be put into any quiz, survey, or self-assessment.