Hello,
I am in the process of creating several courses in Moodle. The courses are for teachers instead of students. Some courses fit under multiple categories (i.e. Elementary Teachers, Science, Math, and Social Studies). However, I currently can only add a course to one category.
Does anyone know of a way to add courses to multiple categories? Or a way to tag courses and have the tags show up in the navigation bar on left of screen?
Any advice is much appreciated. I am using Moodle 2.7.
Hi Jason,
A course can only be associated with one course category. There is a way to go around it by:
You can use metalink to automatically enroll all of the original course users to the other course. On the downside, the users will see two identical courses on the front page.
Obviously, this is not a reasonable solution for a large amount of courses.
Hope this helps!
Inbar.
Hi Inbar,
This is a very beautiful idea
Which made me think, from a developer perspective...
That you can also develop a tiny patch to course's theme which check if you added the phrase "link: XXX" in the course's "idnumber" field, and if so, it will automatically redirect the user to the XXX course.
It is only a few lines of code added to the theme, for this to happen, here is a general idea...
<?php
if (strpos($COURSE->idnumber, ':')) {
list($islink, $linkcourseid) = explode(':', $COURSE->idnumber);
if (!empty($islink) and $islink == 'link') {
$redirectlink = new moodle_url($CFG->wwwroot.'/course/view.php?id='.$linkcourseid);
if (has_capability('moodle/course:changeidnumber', context_system::instance())) {
echo html_writer::link($redirectlink, 'Click to redirect to the real course');
} else {
redirect($redirectlink);
}
}
}
?>
Then, it is much easier to manage adding an automatic "link" from each virtual course to the real course.
Considering a large amount of courses, You can update it using the bulk course upload (csv) tool. And create the categories using the bulk category upload tool.
Hi Nadav,
this seems an interesting solution. In wich file I put the code: theme/mytheme/config.php?
Regards,
Michael
Hi,
I found an intersting website (https://docs.moodle.org/24/en/Course_FAQ#Can_I_put_a_course_in_more_than_one_category.3F) and so the correct file: moodle/course/view.php
I added the code before 'context_helper::preload_course' (moodle version: 2.6) in the line 39.
Thank you very much for the code, Nadav.
Regards,
Michael
I changed again the right, so that only the respective trainer of the pseudo course, the manager and the administrator come into it.
if (strpos($course->idnumber, ':')) {
list($islink, $linkcourseid) = explode(':', $course->idnumber);
if (!empty($islink) and $islink == 'link') {
$linkcourseid = trim($linkcourseid);
$redirectlink = new moodle_url($CFG->wwwroot.'/course/view.php?id='.$linkcourseid);
if (has_capability('moodle/course:changeidnumber', context_course::instance($course->id, MUST_EXIST))) {
echo html_writer::link($redirectlink, 'Click to redirect to the real course.');
}
else {
redirect($redirectlink);
}
}
}Hi Michael,
Sorry for the looooong delay, I was on a long vacation
The above suggested code should go into the theme's layout pages (not the config.php)
Especially, the page layout that is marked as "course" page layout in the theme's config.php file.
(Which is the page used by the theme to display the front page of the course)
I will put this on my todo list, and upload a more useful example, soon.
Nadav
And just for the benefit of anyone who comes to this thread via Google - since 2.6 it is also possible to use the Single Activity course format to do the same but without any coding - see the latest version of that FAQ https://docs.moodle.org/28/en/Course_FAQ#Can_I_put_a_course_in_more_than_one_category.3F (and perhaps you'd like to add your edited code to the docs there again as well?)
This is very helpful. Thanks Inbar. We have around 50 courses however, and if each is in an average of three categories that would put 150 courses on the frontpage with many duplicates, so don't think this would work for us.
You can use meta courses which will let you use a single course for content, and the other courses for enrolments.
Hi Mark, I'm not familiar with meta courses. Would that pose the same issue of the copies of courses I need in multiple categories also showing up on front page?
Thanks,
Jason
This makes sense. Thanks Mark.
We already have a customized enrollment solution we are using so this may not work for us.
Seems like there would be a way to add a course to multiple categories. Will continue to look for workarounds.
Jason