If user doesn’t understand the idea of categories, and in our site, there’s one category (called “teaching and learning”) that will contain the vast majority of posts, then how do I make “teaching and learning” appear in the category drop down initially? Thanks!

You can not easily control the order there, best you can do is disable uncategorized from site settings

Thanks. Are they alphabetized in UI. I could artificially name my default category to something that sorts first?

Or, I could rename “uncategorized” ?

The ordering of categories is a long and contentious topic, see: https://meta.discourse.org/t/category-ordering-broken-in-places/17025 for some more context. We display categories in a list in 4 spots but not all of them will respect fixed category positions

[صورة] pitosalas: that will contain the vast majority of posts, then how do I make “teaching and learning” appear in the category drop down initially? If it does contain the majority of posts, that will happen automatically.

Is there an option to rename the category “uncategorized”?

Yes, you can rename the uncategorized category. https://bbs.boingboing.net/ did that.

Setting up a 'default' category

الدعم

الموضوع		الردود	مرات العرض
Default category Feature	34	7426	15 يوليو 2019
Renamed our "uncategorized" Category at setup....backed myself into a corner? Support	11	1129	8 يونيو 2024
Should the order of categories in every place being the same? Feature	6	1082	4 ديسمبر 2025
How to set default Topic 'Category' Support	6	601	3 سبتمبر 2020
Change sort order for category choice in new post Support	2	820	15 فبراير 2021

Setting up a 'default' category

الموضوعات ذات الصلة