Instead of creating individual quiz questions when building a Moodle quiz, you can construct multiple questions in a text document that can be imported into your Moodle course.

Use the Aiken format to easily import Multiple choice questions into a course. While there are many different office programs and text editors available, in our demonstration we'll use Notepad (Mac users can use TextEdit).

There are specific guidelines you need to follow when you use the Aiken format or the import won't work correctly.

~ Don't number any of the questions.

~ Each question must be only one line long. A question longer than one line will be truncated and can be edited in the Question bank after the import.

~ Each answer must start with a single uppercase letter followed by a period or a right parenthesis and then a space. Be consistent with all your questions.

~ There must be one return after each answer. Press ENTER once after you type each answer.

~ The answer line must immediately follow the list of answers starting with the word, ANSWER (all uppercase), a colon, a space, and then the correct answer letter (uppercase).

~ There must be two returns after each question. Press ENTER twice after you type each question.

~ Remove any extra spaces from the beginning and end of the quiz questions.

If you've already created questions in Microsoft Word, you can copy and paste the questions into Notepad or TextEdit and save the document as a *.txt file. You may need to do some editing to remove any extra spaces.

To access Notepad in Windows 10, click the Start button in the bottom left corner of your screen, type Notepad in the search bar, and then click the Notepad application in the search results.

You can also access Notepad in Windows 10 by clicking the Start button, then All Programs, then Windows Accessories, and then Notepad.

Write your quiz questions following the Aiken format guidelines. See the examples below.

After you've created all the quiz questions, click File (1), and then click Save As... (2).

Select the location where you want to save the text file (1). In the File name field, enter the file name (replace the asterisk in the file name [*.txt]) (2), click the drop-down arrow next to Encoding and select UTF-8 (3), and then click Save (4).

The file is now ready for import into Moodle. For next steps, review the article Importing text editor questions into the Moodle Question bank.