A taxonomy is an effective way to plan the overall structure for a new course. You might be familiar with taxonomies in biological classification, where living things are classified based on similarities into categories including kingdom, phylum, family, genus, and species. However, taxonomies are useful for organizing information in any subject.
What is a taxonomy?
Very simply, a taxonomy is a system for organizing information. It involves classifying concepts or things into different categories or into a hierarchy that provides a visual representation of how the different items relate to each other. A taxonomy is often structured like a tree diagram, with larger categories splitting into smaller and smaller subcategories. For example, the taxonomy for cats follows the order Animalia (Kingdom), Chordata (Phylum), Felidae (Family), Felis (Genus), and Catus (Genus).
A textbook or course is structured around a taxonomy of topics and subtopics in a sequence that makes the concepts easy to learn.
How do you develop a taxonomy?
Where do you start developing a taxonomy for your course? Should you create your course from scratch or replicate existing courses?
It depends. While it’s great to be original and innovative in creating content, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. There’s usually a lot in common among textbooks and courses in a particular subject. The distinguishing factor comes in your approach to the subject—how you guide the learner to achieve the learning outcomes by structuring the course and creating activities and assessments that help them learn.
Here are some tips that will help you develop an effective taxonomy or course outline for any skill or subject.
- Keep the end in mind: Define your target audience and the goal for the content as specifically as you can. Ask: What do your learners really need to know? What don’t they need to know? How will they see the final product? How will they experience it?
- E.g., This course will teach backyard poultry farmers in rural Minnesota sales techniques for the best way to market their produce. They really need to know how to find and approach customers and what they should do to prepare for customer encounters. They don’t need to know the biology of a chicken or the history of a particular selling technique. The final product will be an online course.
- Do your research: Search for similar courses (online or offline) and look at what they offer. Look for textbooks on the subject. Identify the most respected and popular ones in the field.
- Find credible reference points. Pick textbooks or courses from well-known institutions to be your reference points. Pick at least two, but not more than five. You do not want to suffer from information overload.
- Compare the topics in each reference point: Add the topics for each reference book or course to a spreadsheet or table. Create these tables in such a way that you can easily compare the topics included in each. You might not need to use this level of detail for every outline, but documenting the process is sometimes very helpful at later stages.
- Use a separate cell for each topic or subtopic.
- Create separate tables for each grade or level.
- Pro tip: Make sure the topics from all your reference materials are in a single document. (Later in the process, this will help you quickly show why you made certain choices in creating your course outline.)
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Book 1 Book 2 Topic 1 General Overview of the Poultry Market Overview of the Poultry Market Subtopic 1 Competitors Products and Services Subtopic 2 Use of Technology Market Trends Subtopic 3 Growth Potential Competitive Advantage Subtopic 4 Myths about the Market Topic 2 Poultry Marketing How to Sell Eggs, Chickens, and Other Farm Products Subtopic 1 Areas to Prioritize Target Market Analysis Subtopic 2 Marketing Strategies Pricing Strategy
- Find common elements and outliers: Once you’ve completed your table, highlight topics that are common to the reference points and look for outliers. The common elements are likely to be things that you must cover, while you can include the outliers depending on how well they fit into your learning goals.
- Build your structure: Pull together the topics you think you should include. Arrange them in a logical order, depending on what your course needs. Here are some tips to consider in building your outline:
- Backward design: Think about the final product. What’s going to happen to the taxonomy or course outline after you create it? Is it going to be used to build videos, a textbook, an instructor-led course? You might have to change your topics accordingly. Define topics that are suitable for the final product.
- Scaffolding: Make sure each new topic builds on topics covered previously. Pay attention to the order in which learners will encounter the topics.
- E.g., If you’re teaching grammar, the topics on subjects and verbs (broader topics) must appear before topics on subject-verb agreement (more specific topics).
- Levels: Make sure your topics are at the same level and your subtopics are at similar levels.
- E.g., In biology, your main topics would be the plant kingdom and the animal kingdom, while the subtopics would be the subtypes within those kingdoms.
- Specificity: Make each topic as specific as you can.
- E.g., Instead of “Important points for interviews,” use “Appropriate dress code and body language during interviews.”
- Look at it like a learner: Let a subject matter expert and (ideally) someone who fits the learner profile review your outline. Make a note of their questions and comments and address them as needed. It’s likely that the learners or others involved in the course will have similar questions.
- Think ahead: If you know that you will be creating other content based on this taxonomy, make your life, or your colleagues’ lives, easier by doing some groundwork as you create your taxonomy.
- Make note of the sources for each topic. This will help you (or your beloved colleagues) find these sources easily later.
- Make a note of what information each topic should include. The topics in the taxonomy might seem very vague for someone who has not done the same research you have done. Make each topic as specific as possible to what you want covered in it and add extra comments or notes as needed.
- If you aren’t sure about what a topic is or what it should cover, don’t add it in without checking with a subject matter expert or doing further research. Otherwise, that topic is likely to create challenges for the person trying to write a chapter or create learning content for the topic.
- Relax: An effective taxonomy establishes a strong foundation for a project and prevents topic-related ambiguity later. If you invest time in creating a strong taxonomy, the next stages of your task become more streamlined and easier to manage. Now that you’ve completed your groundwork, relax, and start preparing for the next stage.
