# Is anyone using Discourse in higher ed for courses?

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-anyone-using-discourse-in-higher-ed-for-courses/59132
**Category:** Community Building
**Created:** [3월 15, 2017, 3:52오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-anyone-using-discourse-in-higher-ed-for-courses/59132 "2017-03-15T03:52:19Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 6

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### Author: ![Jeff\_Pasch](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/jeff_pasch/32/121152_2.png) [@Jeff\_Pasch](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Jeff_Pasch)
#### Post date: [3월 16, 2017, 5:16오전 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/is-anyone-using-discourse-in-higher-ed-for-courses/59132/6 "2017-03-16T05:16:36Z")

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Thank, all, for the info! Very helpful.

Still getting our feet wet with the tool, but leaning toward making each course a private category (or maybe sub-category?), with permissions granted to a group that contains the students, instructors, and TAs for that course.

We could be running hundreds of courses each semester, which means we’d end up with loads of (private) categories. That could _eventually_ be a problem for us, as it looks like there could be issues with having much more than 1000 categories (?), based on what I’m seeing in this topic:

> [@What's the maximum number of categories we can have?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/whats-the-maximum-number-of-categories-we-can-have/57022):
>
> I’m considering using Discourse as the backend for my website and app, but I haven’t seen any documentation on its scaling limits. What’s the maximum number of categories we can have? Is it 1000? 10,000? 100,000? I plan to heavily use the API and create a custom frontend for both web and mobile. Part of this is programmatically creating a new Category whenever a user wants to. So it’s more of a backend systems question than the UI. For example, will the /categories.json endpoint scale? I…

So perhaps we’d need to archive these off at some point…but we’re not going to hit that limit overnight. 🙂

We’d definitely need to bump up the default character limit for group names to accommodate unique names for courses/sections, and it looks like this is doable. Hurray!

> [@Group name character limitation](https://meta.discourse.org/t/group-name-character-limitation/31229/4):
>
> Yes it is … all you need to do to allow long group names is to allow long usernames via site settings.

@pfaffman thanks for sending along your examples! We’ll give those a closer look and let you know what questions come up. And thanks, @fefrei for sharing how you’re approaching this at your institution. Plenty to think about!

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