Another useful sorting option for larger catalogues is adding tagging. If you are familiar with blog tagging, it operates very similarly. 

To add "tags" to a course, you will navigate to the "info" tab of a course. Adding tags is available to all users who can see the info tab so it is useful to hide this tab to roles who should not have this capability (this can be done in the category settings or the info hide plugin). 

Tags can be entered in this input box in a coma-separated list. Ensure that repeated tags are entered with the same spelling and case as it can cause repeat tags to show on the side filters if entered differently. If a course has had tags applied by the current user, there will be a box on top of the tab menu that can be clicked and edited. 

To have the tag cloud appear on the sidebar of a category or course, navigate to its settings and scroll to the "Additional Features".  Click the "Tag Cloud" option to show the view of all used tags in the category, course etc and save. 

Once the tag cloud is enabled, there will now be a sidebar on that item's content page featuring clickable tags that will produce a filtered view of all items in that category, etc that have that tag. Multiple tags can be selected at once. To remove the tags, click on them again. 

Administration Options

Under the administration options for personal workspace there is a sub-menu for tagging. Here admins can set "forbidden tags", search for users using tags (this is not really useful unless general users are allowed to tag courses) and adjust settings and permissions. 

Tagging needs to be enabled here to be used. if the "Show tags of all users" is clicked it will allow all LMS users to see the ones put in by admins in the scenario above, so this needs to be clicked. Should the admin want to change any of the other repository tag settings they can click "edit settings".