Importing and exporting questions

Building an evaluation question by question in the editor works well for a few questions. When there are dozens, it is faster to write everything in a spreadsheet (Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice) and upload the finished file.

The editor supports both paths:

• Import - uploads a file with several questions at once.
• Export - downloads the questions that already exist, to review, fix, or hand off for someone else to fill in.

This applies to the lecture types with questions: Learning Exercise, Pre-test and Final Exam. Besides the CSV spreadsheet, the editor imports files exported from Moodle: see Import from Moodle.

Where to find it

1. In the admin menu, open Contents and choose the content you want to edit.
2. Go to the Content tab to open the editor.
3. In the tree on the left, click the Learning Exercise or Final Exam lecture.
4. Next to the Questions title, in the top-right corner, are three buttons: import, export and add a question.

Note

On an older Learning Exercise, created when the type only accepted a single question, the buttons only appear after you click Add a question. That click converts the exercise to the multiple-question format.

Start from the template

There is no need to work out the format on your own. Click the import button and, in the window that opens, use Download CSV sample: Eduvem generates a spreadsheet already with the column names and two example questions, in your language. Next to it are Download GIFT sample and Download Aiken sample, with examples of the Moodle formats (see Import from Moodle).

Open the template, delete the two example questions, write your own and save the file in CSV format.

The columns

Only the first three are required. The rest are optional and, if left out, Eduvem uses its usual default; two of them (Multiple answers and Shuffle choices) only take effect on the Learning Exercise.

Column	What it’s for
Question	The question’s prompt.
Choice 1, Choice 2, …	The answer options. Use as many columns as you need; if a question has fewer choices than the others, leave the extra cells blank.
Correct answer	Which choice is right (see below).
Multiple answers	Yes allows more than one choice to be marked. Left blank, Eduvem infers it from how many correct answers are given.
Shuffle choices	Yes randomizes the order of the choices on every access.
Show feedback	No hides the message shown after the participant answers.
Feedback correct	Message shown when the participant gets it right.
Feedback wrong	Message shown when the participant gets it wrong.
Reveal correct	Yes shows which choice was correct after the answer.

The Final Exam ignores the Multiple answers and Shuffle choices columns: on it, multiple answers and shuffling apply to the whole exam and are still set in the editor, not in the spreadsheet (the same goes for the number of questions drawn and the minimum score). The feedback columns and Reveal correct are imported normally.

How to indicate the correct answer

Write whatever is most comfortable. All three forms work:

• The choice’s letter: A for the first, B for the second, and so on.
• The choice’s number: 1, 2, 3.
• The choice’s own text: Paris.

For questions with more than one correct answer, separate with a vertical bar: A|C.

True or false questions

A question with exactly two choices, True and False (or Verdadeiro/Falso, Verdadero/Falso, Vrai/Faux), and a single correct answer is imported as True or false: the two choices are fixed, always in that order, and never shuffled. The import summary tells you when this happens. On a Final Exam that accepts more than one answer per question (or when the file has a question with more than one correct answer), these questions are imported as plain multiple choice. If you use Add to the end on an exam that already accepts several answers, the summary also warns about it.

Uploading the file

1. Click the import button.
2. Click Choose file and select the spreadsheet.
3. Check the summary before applying anything.
4. Click Replace all or Add to the end.

Nothing is changed until you click one of the two buttons. Until then, you can swap the file or simply cancel.

Replace or add

• Replace all deletes the lecture’s current questions and puts the spreadsheet’s in their place.
• Add to the end keeps what already exists and adds the new questions after it.

Caution

Replacing the questions of an evaluation that is already in use discards the answers already recorded by participants on that lecture, because they point to the old questions. On a class already in progress, prefer Add to the end.

Rows with a problem

If a row cannot be used, Eduvem does not cancel the whole import: it imports the good rows, skips the rest, and shows each one with the row number exactly as it appears in your spreadsheet.

The most common reasons:

Message	What to fix
The correct answer “…” does not match any choice	Check whether the letter, number or text matches one of the choices on the same row.
The correct answer “…” matches more than one choice	There are repeated choices on the row; make each one different, or indicate the answer by letter.
A question needs at least two choices	Fill in at least two choice columns.
The prompt is empty	The Question column is blank.
The first row needs to name the columns	The file was saved without the header. Download the template and reuse its first row.

There is also a case that does not generate an error message: if the header’s accents come out garbled (for example M√łltipla escolha instead of Múltipla escolha), Eduvem stops recognizing that column and simply ignores whatever is in it - a Yes in Multiple answers, for example, has no effect at all, and the import finishes with no reported problem. This happens with files downloaded before the August 2026 fix, when Mac Excel opened the template with the wrong encoding. Download the template again and rebuild the spreadsheet from it - fixing the accents by hand in the old file also works, but it is easy to miss a column.

Fix it in the spreadsheet and upload it again, or apply the good rows now and complete the rest later.

Import from Moodle (Moodle XML, GIFT and Aiken)

If your questions are already in Moodle, you do not need to rebuild them in a spreadsheet. The same Import questions button accepts Moodle XML, GIFT and Aiken files, besides CSV. Eduvem recognizes the format from the uploaded file, and you choose Choose file as usual.

The Import questions button is in the content editor (Final exam, Pre-test and Exercise) and also in the Question library.

The same window has the links Download CSV sample, Download GIFT sample and Download Aiken sample, with a small file in each format to use as a starting point.

What is imported

Each Moodle question type becomes the equivalent Eduvem type:

Moodle type	Becomes in Eduvem	What changes
Multiple choice, one answer	Multiple choice	Partial credit is removed: only the alternative worth 100% counts as correct.
Multiple choice, several answers	Multiple choice	Negative marking and partial credit are removed: every alternative with a positive grade becomes correct.
True/False	True or false	The labels follow the content language. In an exam that accepts several answers, it becomes plain multiple choice.
Short answer	Fill in the blank	Only answers worth 100% are kept. Wildcard (*) answers are not imported, and case sensitivity is ignored.
Numerical	Fill in the blank (numeric value)	If tolerances differ, the first answer’s tolerance is used.
Matching	Matching	Unmatched answers are removed. At least two pairs are needed.
Ordering (Moodle plugin)	Ordering	Imported when Eduvem recognizes the type in the file.

The Aiken format only carries single-answer multiple-choice questions. GIFT and Moodle XML follow the table above.

The feedback for a correct answer and for a wrong answer is also imported. Per-alternative feedback is not.

What is not imported

• Images and formatting. The import is text only: images, bold, links and lists do not come along. The question arrives without the image, and the report says so.
• Questions of other types: essay, description, calculated (and its variations), missing words, drag and drop, image markers, embedded answers (Cloze) and random question selection.
• Questions with a problem: no correct answer, or that would become invalid after conversion.
• Multi-language content. Fill in the blank, matching and ordering depend on the language of the answer key and are not imported into multi-language content.

The import report

After you choose the file, the window shows a report per question before anything is applied:

• Imported: the question comes in exactly as it was in the file.
• Imported with a change: the question comes in with a change, and the report gives the reason (for example, “partial credit removed” or “image not imported”).
• Not imported: the question is left out, with the Moodle type and the reason (for example, “Moodle: essay - type not supported”).

If none of the questions in the file can be imported, the window says so. You can import the rest now, or fix the file and upload it again.

The limit is 500 questions per import. The file can be up to 2 MB; for Moodle XML, up to 10 MB.

Note

In a Final Exam, the import may show two warnings: the exam will start accepting several answers if any imported question has more than one correct answer, and the question difficulty analysis will not include the exam if it has questions that are not multiple choice.

Moodle categories and tags

In the Question library, Moodle categories become tags: Eduvem uses the last level of the category path as the question’s tag. You can also fill in Tag for all imported questions, which is added to the tags that already come from the file. In the editor’s evaluations, categories are ignored.

Exporting the current questions

The export button downloads the selected lecture’s questions into a spreadsheet. It is useful to:

• review the whole evaluation at once, instead of opening it question by question;
• bulk-fix and bring the file back through import;
• hand off to someone else to write or review the questions, without giving them access to the editor.

The file opens directly in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice.

Caution

The spreadsheet only stores text. Bold, links and lists used in the prompt or the choices do not go into the file and are lost if you reimport it. Eduvem warns before downloading when it finds formatting that will be lost. If your evaluation uses formatting, edit those questions through the editor.

After importing

The questions enter the content’s draft, like any other edit made in the editor. Check the imported questions and publish the content so participants start seeing them.

Note

While translating multilingual content, import is unavailable: in that mode you can only translate text, not change the questions’ structure. See Multilingual content.

See also

• Evaluations and final exam
• Modular content
• Content creation