Managing Moodle Course Categories

Categories are a site-wide way to organize your courses. You can also create subcategories. The categories or subcategories become an online course catalog.

Every Moodle course belongs to one course category. For sites with one or a few courses, you often hide and ignore the categories and display just the courses. When you need to show your users an organized catalog, then you display the categories and subcategories.

Front Page Display

The settings for the front page of your site are found under

Site Administration → Front Page → Front Page Settings

The list that shows both course categories and the courses is called the combo list. The combo list gives your front page an organized appearance. If you have a moderate number of courses, and the categories are self-explanatory for your users, this is a good option for your front page.

If you have a lot of categories and courses, a combo list becomes too long for your front page. In that case, you can display just the course categories. The user can select a category and see the courses under that category.

The third option for showing courses on the front page is list of courses. This is a good option if your site has only a few courses.

How To Create Create Course Category

1. From the Administration menu on the left side of the page, navigate to

Site Administration → Courses → Manage courses and categories

This page displays the course categories. In this page, you create new categories and courses. You can also arrange the order in which the categories are displayed on the front page.

2. Click "Create new category" link. The Add new category page is displayed. Select where, in the hierarchy of categories, this one will be.

3. In the Category name field, enter a name for the category. Your users will see this in the category list.

4. In the Description field, enter a description for the category. If you configure your front page to show a list of categories, the user will see this description on selecting a particular category.

5. Click the Create category button. Moodle creates the category and returns you to the Manage courses and categories screen.