Managing course categories

Categories are how the library is organised. Every course can sit in one, and the category facet down the left of the library is the main way somebody narrows a long list to the handful they want.

Where they live

Choose Admin, then Categories in the left-hand menu and Courses. The screen is titled Course categories, and it is separate from report categories and CPD categories, which have their own entries in the same menu.

Adding one

1. Choose New course category.
2. Enter a name. It is the only field, and it is required.
3. Choose Add course category.

There is no description, no colour and no parent to choose. A category is a name and nothing else, so spend the effort on the name.

What the list tells you

Each row shows the category and how many courses are in it. The count is the thing to look at before you change anything, because it decides whether the category can be deleted at all.

Active and Archived are separate views. A search box, a sort control and a page-size control sit above the list.

Renaming, archiving and deleting

The three dots at the end of a row offer Edit, Archive and Delete.

Editing renames the category. Courses in it stay in it, and the new name appears everywhere the old one did.

Archiving takes the category out of use without touching the courses in it. Where a category has subcategories beneath it, archiving the top one archives those too.

Deleting is refused while any course is in the category. You are not asked to confirm and then told afterwards; the delete simply will not go through until the courses are moved out.

A few categories are built in and cannot be deleted at all.

So archive is almost always the action you want. It is the one that works on a category with courses in it, it is reversible from the Archived view, and it leaves the history of what was categorised where intact.

Importing a list of them

Import course categories takes a spreadsheet, which is worth using if you are setting up an account rather than adding one category to an established list. It accepts .xlsx, .xls, .xlsm, .csv and .txt.

The import hands back a report spreadsheet telling you what it did with each row, so check that rather than assuming everything landed.

One thing categories do that is easy to miss

People can follow a category. In the library, the category filter carries a Subscribe to notifications control, and anybody who has subscribed is told when a course appears in that category for the first time.

That notification goes out on a course’s first publish only. Publishing the same course again later, after edits, tells the people it is assigned to but does not tell the category’s subscribers a second time.