Does eLearning Need a New Taxonomy?

Measuring success in eLearning is not as straight forward as first thought. Because to evaluate success we first need to know what we are measuring, or at least, from whose perspective we are measuring it. The thing to consider are the many players involved; students, teachers, school administrators, and technology suppliers. Each has their own agenda/goals/needs.

Many of us know of Benjamin Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. Bloom was interested in promoting higher-order thinking, such as problem solving and not just rote learning / memorising. However, we need to consider if eLearning would not be better off by having its own taxonomy (taxonomy of eLearning) to help us more accurately define the point-of-view when trying to measure success. 

Why is this important? Imagine a large-scale eLearning project that was implemented on time, to budget, saved the organisation lots of money, earned the vendor lots of money, but was hated by teaching staff and students alike. Is this a success? For the vendor, yes. For the organisation, yes. For the student and teacher, clearly no. We need to be able to accurately measure the outcomes according to the different interests involved, therefore the need for a new taxonomy of eLearning.

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