Course Categories

The role of a Moodle administrator is to manage the categories and courses. It is possible to grant non-administrators rights to deal with categories, but we will deal with this in Chapter 6, when we cover roles. Here, let's start with an overview of the categories.

Course Categories Overview

Categories act as containers for courses. They can have sub-categories, which can have sub-sub-categories, and so on. This hierarchical structure can be visualized as follows:

A course always belongs to a single category. It cannot belong to multiple categories and also cannot be without a category. There is one exception to this rule, namely, the front page. Internally, the front page is treated as a course that neither belongs to a category, nor can be deleted.

There are different ways of organizing the courses' and categories' hierarchy, for instance by faculty, by subject area, by intake year, and so on. The following figure shows the positioning of the same course in hierarchies...