Navigation Menu

OK, its now 5am. I'vce spent an entire night googleling the net for this.In a nut shell I need to have a dropdown menu similar to the Table of content menu (without the "+/-" graphics).Why on gods green earth would an eLearning tool have one navigation system. Most if not all elearning applications consist of modules, lessons and topics. Why would there be a navigation that spans to the right side of the page covering the page content. why would you have a tree nav like TOC which make sense, yet have the course sub-navigation going the other way. Why not have or allow a way to use the TOC navigation as a menu to traverse pages.This is insane.