I can't imagine that this method has sufficed for everyone, so, I am curious...What is everyone else doing to create the categories?
I have come the realization that I must be the only one who thinks that the Question Bank categories section needs an upgrade and should be more functional. Every time I create a new course, I have to go through the same lengthy and tedious process of creating the categories, one at a time. Often, repeating the same subcategories because I need them in multiple categories and there is no duplicate or copy button.
You might be creating too much work for yourself based upon your interpretation of categories.
A category of questions can be shared among many courses, there is no need (unless your moodle administrator objects) to duplicate questions. In some LMSs, like Blackboard, one has to do this. But not in Moodle. With some thought and organization, any specific question only needs to be in the Moodle question bank once.
The key is to be able to create higher level categories that are shared among the appropriate courses.
Keep asking questions for more help.
You can import a complete categories tree from an xml file. Consider for example the following hierarchy:
- Category A
- Category A1
- Category A2
- Category B
- Category B1
- Category B2
The file should start with:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<quiz>
Then the list of categories:
<question type="category"><category><text>Category A</text></category></question>
<question type="category"><category><text>Category A/Category A1</text></category></question>
<question type="category"><category><text>Category A/Category A2</text></category></question>
<question type="category"><category><text>Category B</text></category></question>
<question type="category"><category><text>Category B/Category B1</text></category></question>
<question type="category"><category><text>Category B/Category B2</text></category></question>
Note that a sub category is specified by a slash separated list of categories in the full path of the category.
And the file should end with:
</quiz>
hth
It is a very useful feature, I wonder if the same approach could be used for creating grade book categories. It is also a time consuming task.
I apologize for the delay in responding, been swamped. I gave your XML suggestion a try and it worked wonderfully. Thank you so much. Still wish they would just build this feature in though. The questions are usually built . The XML file thing works in the interim, hadn't considered being able to do that without actually adding the questions at the same time.
We don't have multiple classes that share questions. There is just the science teacher or the math teacher or the history teacher who teaches all the sciences or math or history for the high school and we don't want to see all the categories in every class, just the ones that are specific to the subject. So, the ability to duplicate the categories would help for the sake of being able to create the first chapter as a category and then all the subsections to that chapter as categories, then to be able to go to an option to replicate that category and its subcategories "x" number of times, would help a lot.
Thanks again,