text2qti – Create quizzes in QTI format from Markdown-based plain text

text2qti converts Markdown-based plain text files into quizzes in QTI format (version 1.2), which can be imported by Canvas and other educational software. It supports multiple-choice, true/false, multiple-answers, numerical, short-answer (fill-in-the-blank), essay, and file-upload questions. It includes basic support for LaTeX math within Markdown, and allows a limited subset of siunitx notation for units and for numbers in scientific notation.

Examples

text2qti allows quick and efficient quiz creation. Example multiple-choice plain-text quiz question that can be converted to QTI and then imported by Canvas:

1.  What is 2+3?
a)  6
b)  1
*c) 5

A question is created by a line that starts with a number followed by a period and one or more spaces or tabs ("1. "). Possible choices are created by lines that start with a letter followed by a closing parenthesis and one or more spaces or tabs ("a) "). Numbers and letters do not have to be ordered or unique. The correct choice is designated with an asterisk ("*c) "). All question and choice text is processed as Markdown.

There is also support for a quiz title and description, as well as question titles, point values, and feedback. Note that unlike most other text, titles like quiz and question titles are treated as plain text, not Markdown, due to the QTI format. Also note that Canvas apparently ignores the quiz description and question titles. Question point values must be positive integers or half-integers.

Quiz title: Addition
Quiz description: Checking addition.

Title: An addition question
Points: 2
1.  What is 2+3?
... General question feedback.
+   Feedback for correct answer.
-   Feedback for incorrect answer.
a)  6
... Feedback for this particular answer.
b)  1
... Feedback for this particular answer.
*c) 5
... Feedback for this particular answer.

Multiple-answers questions use [] or [ ] for incorrect answers and [*] for correct answers.

1.  Which of the following are dinosaurs?
[ ] Woolly mammoth
[*] Tyrannosaurus rex
[*] Triceratops
[ ] Smilodon fatalis

Numerical questions use an equals sign followed by one or more spaces or tabs followed by the numerical answer. Acceptable answers can be designated as a range of the form [<min>, <max>] or as a correct answer with a specified acceptable margin of error <ans> +- <margin>. When the latter form is used, <margin> can be either a number or a percentage. <margin> can be omitted when the answer is an integer and an exact answer is required. In this case, scientific notation is not permitted, but the underscore can be used as a digit separator; for example, 1000 and 1_000 are both valid, but 1e3 is not. An exact answer can be required for floating-point numbers, but this requires an explicit +- 0, since a range is typically more appropriate for floating-point values. Numerical questions have the limitation that the absolute value of the smallest acceptable answer must be greater than or equal to 0.0001 (1e-4).

1.  What is the square root of 2?
=   1.4142 +- 0.0001

2.  What is the cube root of 2?
=   [1.2598, 1.2600]

3.  What is 2+3?
=   5

Short-answer (fill-in-the-blank) questions use an asterisk followed by one or more spaces or tabs followed by an answer. Multiple acceptable answers can be given. Answers are restricted to a single line each and are treated as plain text, not Markdown.

1.  Who lives at the North Pole?
*   Santa
*   Santa Claus
*   Father Christmas
*   Saint Nicholas
*   Saint Nick

Essay questions are indicated by a sequence of three or more underscores. They only support general question feedback.

1.  Write an essay.
... General question feedback.
____

File-upload questions are indicated by a sequence of three or more circumflex accents. They only support general question feedback.

1.  Upload a file.
... General question feedback.
^^^^

Text regions outside of questions are supported. Note that unlike most other text, titles like text region titles are treated as plain text, not Markdown, due to the QTI format. Also note that Canvas apparently ignores the text region title and only displays the text itself. Text regions are not required to have both a title and text; either may be used alone, but the title must come first when both are present.

Text title:  Instructions about the next questions
Text:  General comments about the next questions.

Installation

Install Python 3.6+ if it is not already available on your machine. See https://www.python.org/, or use the package manager or app store for your operating system. Depending on your use case, you may want to consider a Python distribution like Anaconda instead.

Install setuptools for Python if it is not already installed. This can be accomplished by running

python -m pip install setuptools

on the command line. Depending on your system, you may need to use python3 instead of python. This will often be the case for Linux and OS X.

Install text2qti by running this on the command line:

python -m pip install text2qti

Depending on your system, you may need to use python3 instead of python. This will often be the case for Linux and OS X.

Upgrading

python -m pip install text2qti --upgrade

Depending on your system, you may need to use python3 instead of python. This will often be the case for Linux and OS X.

Installing the development version

If you want to install the development version to use the latest features, download text2qti from GitHub, extract the files, and then run

python setup.py install

Depending on your system, you may need to use python3 instead of python. This will often be the case for Linux and OS X.

Usage

text2qti has been designed to create QTI files for use with Canvas. Some features may not be supported by other educational software. You should always preview quizzes or assessments after converting them to QTI and importing them.

Write your quiz or assessment in a plain text file. You can use a basic editor like Notepad or gedit, or a code editor like VS Code. You can even use Microsoft Word, as long as you save your file as plain text (*.txt).

text2qti is a command-line application. Open a command line in the same folder or directory as your quiz file. Under Windows, you can hold the SHIFT button down on the keyboard, then right click next to your file, and select "Open PowerShell window here" or "Open command window here". You can also launch "Command Prompt" or "PowerShell" through the Start menu, and then navigate to your file using cd.

Run the text2qti application using a command like this:

text2qti quiz.txt

Replace "quiz.txt" with the name of your file. This will create a file like quiz.zip (with "quiz" replaced by the name of your file) which is the converted quiz in QTI format.

Instructions for using the QTI file with Canvas:

• Go to the course in which you want to use the quiz.
• Go to Settings, click on "Import Course Content", select "QTI .zip file", choose your file, and click "Import". Typically you should not need to select a question bank; that should be managed automatically.
• While the quiz upload will often be very fast, there is an additional processing step that can take up to several minutes. The status will probably appear under "Current Jobs" after upload.
• Once the quiz import is marked as "Completed", the imported quiz should be available under Quizzes. If the imported quiz does not appear after several minutes, there may be an error in your quiz file or a bug in text2qti. When Canvas encounters an invalid quiz file, it tends to fail silently; instead of reporting an error in the quiz file, it just never creates a quiz based on the invalid file.
• You should always preview the quiz before use. text2qti can detect a number of potential issues, but not everything.

Typically, you should start your quizzes with a title, like this:

Quiz title: Title here

Otherwise, all quizzes will have the default title "Quiz", so it will be difficult to tell them apart. Another option is to rename quizzes after importing them. Note that unlike most other text, the title is treated as plain text, not Markdown, due to the QTI format.

When you run text2qti for the first time, it will attempt to create a configuration file called .text2qti.bespon in your home or user directory. It will also ask for an institutional LaTeX rendering URL. This is only needed if you plan to use LaTeX math; if not, simply press ENTER to continue.

• If you use Canvas, log into your account and look in the browser address bar. You will typically see an address that starts with something like institution.instructure.com/ or canvas.institution.edu/, with institution replaced by the name of your school or an abbreviation for it. The LateX rendering URL that you want to use will then be something like https://institution.instructure.com/equation_images/ or https://canvas.institution.edu/equation_images/, with institution replaced by the appropriate value for your school. If the URL is like the second form, you may need to replace the .edu domain with the appropriate value for your institution.
• If you use other educational software that handles LaTeX in a manner compatible with Canvas, consult the documentation for your software. Or perhaps create a simple quiz within the software using its built-in tools, then export the quiz to QTI and look through the resulting output to find the URL.
• If you are using educational software that does not handle LaTeX in a manner compatible with Canvas, try the --pandoc-mathml command-line option when creating QTI files (note that this requires that Pandoc be installed). If that does not work, please open an issue requesting support for that software, and include as much information as possible about how that software processes LaTeX.

Additional features

Question groups

A question group contains multiple questions, and only a specified number of these are randomly selected and used each time a quiz is taken.

GROUP
pick: 1
points per question: 1

1.  A question.
*a) true
b)  false

2.  Another question.
*a) true
b)  false

END_GROUP

The number of questions from the group that are used is specified with "pick:". If this is omitted, it defaults to 1. The points assigned per question is specified with "points per question:". If this is omitted, it defaults to 1. All questions within a group must be worth the same number of points.

Executable code blocks

text2qti can execute the code in Markdown-style fenced code blocks. Code can be used to generate questions within a quiz. Everything written to stdout by the executed code is included in the quiz file; the code block is replaced by stdout.

```{.python .run}
import textwrap
for x in [2, 3]:
    print(textwrap.dedent(rf"""
        1.  What is ${x}\times 5$?
        *a) ${x*5}$
        b)  ${x+1}$
        """))
```

For code to be executed, there are a few requirements:

• The code block fences (```) must not be indented; the code block must be at the top level of the document, not part of a question, choice, or feedback.
• As a security measure, code execution is disabled by default, so executable code blocks will trigger an error. Run text2qti with the option --run-code-blocks to enable code execution, or set run_code_blocks = true in the text2qti config file in your user or home directory.
• The text immediately after the opening fence must have the form {.lang .run}. This is inspired by the code-block attributes in Pandoc Markdown. lang must designate an executable that can run the code once the code has been saved to a file. In the example above, python is extracted from the first line ( ```{.python .run}), code is saved in a temporary file, and then the file is executed via python <file>.

Each code block is executed in its own process, so data and variables are not shared between code blocks.

If an executable code block generates multiple questions that are identical, or multiple choices for a single question that are identical, this will be detected by text2qti and an error will be reported. Questions or choices that may be equivalent, but are not represented by exactly the same text, cannot be detected (for example, things like 100 versus 1e2, or answer versus Answer).

Additional quiz options

There are additional quiz options that can be set immediately after the quiz title and quiz description. These options are apparently ignored by Canvas, but may work with some other systems. These all take values true or false. For example, Shuffle answers: true could be on the line right after the quiz description.

• Shuffle answers — Shuffle answer order for questions.
• Show correct answers — Show correct answers after submission.
• One question at a time — Only show one question at a time.
• Can't go back — Don't allow going back to the previous question when in One question at a time mode.

Details for writing quiz text

text2qti processes almost all text as Markdown, using Python-Markdown. (The only exceptions are the quiz title, question titles, and text region titles, which are processed as plain text due to the QTI format, plus the acceptable answers for short-answer questions.) For example, *emphasized* produces emphasized text, which typically appears as italics. Text can be styled using Markdown notation, or with HTML. Remember to preview quizzes after conversion to QTI, especially when using any significant amount of HTML.

Python-Markdown provides several extensions to basic Markdown. Currently, the following extensions are enabled:

• smarty: Automatic curly quotation marks and dashes.
• sane_lists: List behavior is closer to what might be expected.
• def_list: Definition lists of this form:

  term
  :   definition
  

• fenced_code: Fenced code blocks (``` or ~~~).
• footnotes: Footnotes using this form:

  Normal text [^1].
  
  [^1]: Footnote text.
  

• tables: Tables of this form:

  Header | Header
  ------ | ------
  Cell   | Cell
  Cell   | Cell
  

• md_in_html: Text inside HTML tags is treated as Markdown. This requires setting the attribute markdown="1" in the opening tag for block-level elements. See the documentation for more details about proper usage and potential issues.

While indented Markdown code blocks are supported, fenced code blocks should be preferred. Indented code can interfere with the preprocessor that strips HTML comments and handles LaTeX math and siunitx notation.

Titles

Quiz, question, and text region titles are limited to a single paragraph. If this paragraph is wrapped over multiple lines, all lines after the first must be indented by at least two spaces or one tab, and share the same indentation. All tabs are expanded to 4 spaces before indentation is compared, following the typical Markdown approach.

All titles are treated as plain text, not Markdown, due to the QTI format.

Titles are always optional, but when they are used for a given element, they are always required to be first, before any other attributes.

Descriptions, questions, choices, feedback, and text regions

Descriptions, questions, choices, feedback, and text regions may span multiple paragraphs and include arbitrary Markdown content like code blocks or quotations. Everything must be indented to at least the same level as the start of the first paragraph on the initial line. All tabs are expanded to 4 spaces before indentation is compared, following the typical Markdown approach. For example,

1.  A question paragraph that is long enough to wrap onto a second line.
    The second line must be indented to match up with the start of the
    paragraph text on the first line.

    Another paragraph.

Note that the acceptable answers for short-answer questions are treated as plain text and limited to a single line, and numerical answers are also processed specially and limited to a single line.

Images

Images are included with the standard Markdown syntax:

![alt_text](image_file)

It will typically be easiest to put your image files in the same folder or directory as the quiz file, so you can use something like ![alt](image.jpg). However, file paths are supported, including ~ user expansion under all operating systems. All image paths not starting with http:// or https:// are assumed to refer to local image files (files on your machine), and will result in errors if these files are not found.

LaTeX

By default, text2qti supports LaTeX using a Canvas LaTeX rendering URL. This can be set during installation, or by editing the configuration file .text2qti.bespon in your home or user directory. It is possible to convert LaTeX to MathML instead with the --pandoc-mathml command-line option. This requires that Pandoc be installed for converting LaTeX to MathML. For example, to create a quiz you might run a command like this:

text2qti --pandoc-mathml quiz.txt

When --pandoc-mathml is used, a cache file _text2qti_cache.zip will be created in the quiz file directory. This is used to store Pandoc MathML output to increase performance for long quizzes with lots of math.

text2qti supports inline LaTeX math within dollar signs $. There must be a non-space character immediately after the opening $ and immediately before the closing $. For example, $F = ma$. LaTeX math is limited to what is supported by Canvas or whatever other educational software you are using. It is usually a good idea to preview imported quizzes before assigning them, because text2qti cannot detect LaTeX incompatibilities or limitations. There is currently not support for block LaTeX math; only inline math is supported.

When using Canvas with LaTeX math, be aware that in some cases Canvas's vertical alignment of math leaves much to be desired. Sometimes this can be improved by including \vphantom{fg} or \strut at the beginning of an equation. An alternative is simply to use LaTeX for all question or choice text (via \text, etc.).

text2tqi supports a limited subset of LaTeX siunitx notation. You can use notation like \num{1.23e5} to enter numbers in scientific notation. This would result in 1.23×10⁵. You can use notation like \si{m/s} or \si{N.m} to enter units. These would result in m/s and N·m. Unit macros currently are not supported, with these exceptions: \degree, \celsius, \fahrenheit, \ohm, \micro. Finally, numbers and units can be combined with notation like \SI{1.23e5}{m/s}. All of these can be used inside or outside LaTeX math.

Technical note: LaTeX and siunitx support are currently implemented as preprocessors that are used separately from Python-Markdown. In rare cases, this may lead to conflicts with Markdown syntax. These features may be reimplemented as Python-Markdown extensions in the future.

Comments

There are multiple ways to add comments within a quiz file. In all cases, comments are completely removed during quiz creation and do not appear in the final quiz in any form.

At the top level of a quiz document (outside of questions, choices, or feedback) there are two types of comments. These comments cannot be indented.

• Line comments: Any line that starts with a percent sign % is discarded.
• Multiline comments: If a line starts with COMMENT, that line and all subsequent lines are discarded through a line that starts with END_COMMENT. The COMMENT and END_COMMENT delimiters must be on lines by themselves; otherwise, an error is raised.

Within Markdown text, standard HTML comments of the form <!--comment--> may be used. These are stripped out during processing and do not appear in the final QTI file. HTML comments are not supported within LaTeX math.

Technical note: HTML comments are currently stripped in a preprocessing step separate from Python-Markdown. In rare cases, this may conflict with raw HTML embedded in Markdown. This feature may be reimplemented as a Python-Markdown extension in the future.