Did you know the LMS has a filtering option available in courses and categories? This can be a very useful tool for large catalogues to allow users to do title searching amongst other things. 

Enabling Filters

To enable filters, click the settings of the course or category you wish to add them to and scroll to the bottom of the settings under "Additional Features".

To turn filtering on simply click the filter checkbox. If you want all items to populate on the item load if there is no filter field added, click the "Show on Empty Filter". If this is unchecked, no items will show on unfiltered load which can be confusing for users. Once these options are saved, a new subtab will be available in the settings tab called "Filter". This is where admins can set what options they want to be available to the filter. 

There are a few options available to be set in the filtering field. The most useful will probably be the title field, which allows users to search for specific titles or titles containing specific words. If the course modules or category items make use of their description fields, having this as a filtering field might be useful. Title/Description refers to one field option combined search through titles and descriptions. If you enable this one option instead of both title and description separately, the user would not have to enter that field search key into 2 boxes. For Keyword searching, the admin would have to make sure that keywords are being used by modules or courses to have it be of any use. To set keywords, navigate to the "metadata" tab and enter keywords in the box with the label "keyword". Author, Copyright, and Object Type are pretty self-explanatory but will probably not be very useful to end users. Tutorial Support searches the last names of tutorial supporters.

Select all the field you want to be available to users and save. 

Once the filtering has been enabled and configured, a new "Filter" option will appear on the category or course. If there are multiple options available for filtering there will be a "plus" button with a dropdown of options for filtering by multiple fields. Once the desired search options are inputted, the user can apply or reset the inputs.  There is an "On/Off" toggle that allows the filters to be set on or off as well.