Yeah, moving topics en masse is a bit of a pain, but reparenting an entire category from “current courses” to “past courses” would be pretty easy, I think.
The benefits of doing this are that each term could start fresh.
That could be a downside though, depending on whether you think having content from previous terms is valuable or detrimental, and how much effort it takes your team to create new categories for every term.
Having categories last indefinitely certainly reduces that effort. If it’s workable, sounds great.
And if it becomes a problem to have old content around forever, maybe that’s “a good problem to have”, it shouldn’t be too bad to shift to the model I suggested later.
I think your theory here is sound.
Having subcategories for each of those activities within each course category seems reasonable.
I think it again depends a bit on how confident you are that the additional complexity is warranted, and if so, whether that’s the right shape.
You could use a restricted tag for announcements instead, which has some benefits.
The last two could be handled via group PMs instead of a category.
I think both options are worth considering. There are some tradeoffs between them.
As you get deeper into setting things up, keep asking questions as you bump into them.
And regardless of which direction you choose to start with, I’d love to hear occasional updates about how things are going!