Moodle 1.9: New Question Categories and Moving Questions

Channell C. Walker

An instructor sent in an email asking about re-organizing his question categories. He first created a quiz with a new Top-level Activity Question Category and wanted to move those questions to the default question category for the course.

To do this he first had to create a new category within the Course Category:

  1. On the homepage of your course, go to the Administration block.
  2. Choose Questions from the list.
  3. Select the Categories tab.
  4. You should see the header, Question Categories for ‘Course: [Insert course name here]. This let’s you know that you are going to edit categories for the course and not for a specific activity. 
  5. Scroll down to the bottom to the Add Category box.
  6. For Parent, choose ‘Top.’ This adds the category as a top level category in the course.
  7. Give the category a title and the category info is optional. 
  8. Click the ‘Add Category’ button.
  9. You should see the new category at the bottom of the list for your course question categories. If your course has multiple pages of categories, then go to the last page to see the new category. 
  10. You can use the arrows next to the category title to move it to a different place in the list. 

Then he had to move multiple questions from the Activity Category to the Course Category:

  1. To move questions from an Activity Category to a Course Category:
  2. Go to the Quiz and click on the edit icon. This will take you to the quiz settings.
  3. Scroll down to the bottom and click on the ‘Save and Display’ button
  4. Under the tabs, click on the Export link.
  5. The header should say, Export Questions to File
  6. For file format, select Moodle XML format
  7. Then for Category, choose the old category with the questions you want to move.
  8. Leave boxes checked.
  9. Click on the ‘Export questions to file’ button.
  10. This will open a page with the questions about to be exported.
  11. Click on the continue button.
  12. You’ll see the Question Bank with the exported questions at the bottom. 
  13. Under the Action column, check the boxes next to each question.
  14. Under With Selected, choose the new category where you want to move the questions.
  15. Click the ‘Move to >>’ button.
  16. Your questions are now listed in the new category. You should see the number questions in parentheses increase by the number of questions added.

Leave a comment