Course Description

The Course description tool lets you write a structured, multi-section description of your course — its goals, methodology, materials, and more. Unlike the free-text Course introduction banner on your course homepage, which only your enrolled learners see, the course description is what prospective learners see before they enroll, from the course catalog.

Once enrolled, learners can still refer back to it from within the course — if you leave the tool visible to them, it is a convenient place for them to check practical information such as the general structure of the course or who the teachers are, without needing to ask you directly. Enrolled learners can view the sections you wrote but cannot add, edit, or delete them.

Accessing the Tool

Open the Course description tool from the course homepage tool grid.

The Eight Sections

A course description is made of up to eight independent sections. Each one is optional — fill in only the ones relevant to your course:

Section	Guiding question
Description	What is the goal of the course? Are there prerequisites? How is this training connected to other courses?
Objectives	What should the end results be when the learner has completed the course? What are the activities performed during the course?
Topics	How does the course progress? Where should the learner pay special care? Are there identifiable problems in understanding different areas? How much time should one dedicate to the different areas of the course?
Methodology	What methods and activities help achieve the objectives of the course? What would the schedule be?
Course material	Is there a course book, a collection of papers, a bibliography, a list of links on the internet?
Resources	Consider the courses, tutors, a technical helpdesk, teachers, and/or materials available.
Assessment	How will learners be assessed? Are there strategies to develop in order to master the topic?
Other	Anything that doesn't fit the categories above. You can add as many Other sections as you need, each with its own custom title.

Adding a Section

1. In the tool's toolbar, click the icon for the section type you want to write

2. Chamilo shows a Help box with the guiding question for that section — use it to decide what to write

3. Write your content in the rich text editor (supports formatting, images, links, embedded video, and other rich content)

4. Save

Each section you add appears as its own card in the tool. Use the Edit and Delete icons on a card to update or remove it later.

Link to the Course Catalog

This is the main reason to fill in a course description: it feeds directly into the Explore more courses catalog that visitors and prospective learners browse.

• A course with no description sections filled in shows as a plain card in the catalog.

• A course with at least one description section becomes clickable — clicking its image, title, or info button opens a detailed popup listing every section you wrote, in the same order shown above.

This gives prospective learners a real basis to decide whether to enroll, instead of just a title and a thumbnail.

Whether this popup is available at all depends on a platform-wide setting. If your descriptions don't appear to prospective learners in the catalog, ask your administrator to check the Show Course Descriptions setting (show_courses_descriptions_in_catalog) under Administration > Configuration settings > Course Catalog.

Tips

• Prioritize the Description and Objectives sections — these are what most prospective learners read first when deciding whether to enroll.

• Keep it current — update your course description whenever the course content changes significantly, so the catalog always reflects what learners will actually get.

• Use rich content sparingly — images and formatting help readability, but a long, cluttered popup can be harder to scan than a few clear paragraphs.