What are categories?

Categories are a way of grouping your courses, programs and certifications. You can think of categories as folders, used to organise your learning content in intuitive ways. For example, you could create categories for different types of learning (such as compliance, onboarding, etc.), or for courses in different languages. Each course, program or certification needs to sit within a category, and only exists within one category.

Here are a few common tasks to get you started with categories on your site:

• Create a category
• Show or hide a category
• Move and reorder categories
• Assign roles within a category

Tenant categories

When you have multitenancy enabled and add a new tenant to your site a new category will be created automatically.

This category should be used for any courses aimed exclusively at members of the tenant. You can still enrol tenant members on courses from other categories, but this category should only contain tenant-specific learning.

Sorting categories

Categories may be sorted by ascending/descending category name, or category ID numbers on the Course and category management page by selecting All categories from the Sorting dropdown and selecting how you want to sort the categories from the dropdown lists.

Managing a large number of courses and categories

If you have thousands of categories and courses on your site, you may experience performance issues when using the Course and category management page (/course/management.php) via Quick-access menu > Courses and categories. 

If these performance issues are making it difficult to manage your content, we recommend enabling the performance versions of the management pages. These have simplified user interfaces and some reduced functionality (you cannot reorder categories), and are focused on providing improved performance. To enable the performance versions of the course, category, program and certification management pages, set the following in config.php:

$CFG->simplified_category_management = true;