In our last episode, you learned how a taxonomy helps you simplify search, create consistency, and deliver personalized learning experiences at scale. In part two of this two-part series, Gretyl Kinsey and Allison Beatty discuss how to start developing your futureproof taxonomy from assessing your content needs to lessons learned from past projects.

Gretyl Kinsey: The ultimate end goal of a taxonomy is to make information easier to find, particularly for your user base because that’s who you’re creating this content for. With learning material, the learner is who you’re creating your courses for. Make sure to keep that end goal in mind when you’re building your taxonomy.

Related links:

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  • Taxonomy: Simplify search, create consistency, and more (podcast, part 1)
  
  
  • The challenges of structured learning content (podcast)
  
  
  • DITA and learning content
  
  
  • Metadata and taxonomy in your spice rack
  
  
  • Transform L&D experiences at scale with structured learning content
  
  
  
  

LinkedIn:

• Gretyl Kinsey


• Allison Beatty

Transcript:

Introduction with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.

Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.

Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky, you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.

Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and process that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.

End of introduction

Allison Beatty: I am Allison Beatty.

Gretyl Kinsey: I’m Gretyl Kinsey.

AB: And in this episode, Gretyl and I continue our discussion about taxonomy.

GK: This is part two of a two-part podcast.

AB: So if you don’t have a taxonomy for your learning content, but you know need one, what are some things to keep in mind about developing one?

GK: Yeah, so there are all kinds of interesting lessons we’ve learned along the way from working with organizations who don’t have a taxonomy and need one. And I want to talk about some of the high-level things to keep in mind, and then we can dive in and think about some examples there. One thing I also want to just say upfront is that it is very common for learning content in particular to be developed in unstructured environments and tools like Microsoft Word or Excel. It’s also really common that if you are working within a learning management system or LMS for there to be a lack of overall consistency because the trade-off there is you want flexibility, right? You want to be able to design your courses in whatever way is best suited for that specific subject or that set of material. But that’s where you do have that trade-off between how consistent is the information and the way it’s organized versus how flexible is it to give your instructional designers that maximum creativity. And so when you’ve got those kinds of considerations, then that can make the information harder for your students to find or to use and even for your content creators. So we’ve seen organizations where they’ve said, “We’ve got all of our learning materials stuck in hundreds of different Word files or spreadsheets or in sometimes different LMS’ or sometimes different areas in the same LMS.” And when they have all of those contributors, like we talked about with multiple authors contributing, or sometimes lots and lots of subject matter experts part-time contributing, that really creates these siloed environments where you’ve got different little pieces of learning material all over the place and no one overarching organizational system. And so that’s typically the driving point that see where that organization will say, “We don’t have a taxonomy. We know that we need one.” But I think that is the first consideration is if you don’t have one and you know you need one, the first question to ask is why? Because so often it is those pain points that I mentioned, that lack of one cohesive system, one cohesive organization for your content, and sometimes also one cohesive repository or storage mechanism. So that’s typically where you’ll have an organization saying, “We don’t have a good way to kind of connect all of our content and have that interoperability that you were talking about earlier, and we need some kind of a taxonomy so that even if we do still have it created in a whole bunch of different ways by a bunch of different people, that when it gets served to the students who are going to be taking these courses, it’s consistent, it’s well-organized, it’s easy for people to find what they need.” So I think that’s the first consideration is that if you’ve got that demand for taxonomy developing, think about where that’s coming from and then use that as the starting point to actually create your taxonomy. And then I think one other thing that can help is to think about how your content is created. So if you do have those disparate environments or you’ve got a lot of unstructured material, then take that into account and think about building a taxonomy in a way that’s going to benefit rather than hinder your creation process. And that is especially important the more people that you have contributing to your learning material. It’s really helpful to try to gather information and metrics from all of your authors and contributors, as well as from your learners. So any kind of a feedback form that, if you’ve got some kind of an e-learning or training website where you can assess information that your learners tell you about, what was good or bad about the experience, what was difficult or what would make their lives easier, that’s really great information for you to have. But also from your contributors, your authors, your subject matter experts, your instructional designers, if they have a way to collect feedback or information on a regular basis that will help enhance the next round of course design, then all of that can contribute to taxonomy creation as well. When you start building a taxonomy from the ground up, you can look at all the metrics that you’ve been collecting and say, “Here’s what people are searching for. We should make sure that we have some categories that reflect that. Here are difficulties that our authors are encountering with being able to find certain information and keep it up to date or with being able to associate things with learning objectives. So let’s build out categories for that.” So really making sure that you use those metrics. And if you’re not collecting them already, it’s never too late to start. I think the biggest thing to keep in mind also is to plan ahead very carefully and to make sure that you’re thinking about the future, that you’re doing futureproofing before you actually build and implement your taxonomy. And I know we both can probably speak to examples of how that’s been done well versus not so well.

AB: Yeah, maintenance is so important.

GK: Yeah, and I think the more that you think about it upfront before you ever build or put a taxonomy in place, the easier that maintenance is going to be, right? Because we’ve seen a lot of situations where an organization will just start with a taxonomy, but maybe it’s not broad enough. So maybe it only starts in one department. Like they have it for just the technical docs, but they don’t have it for the learning material. And then down the road it’s a lot more difficult to go in and have to rework that taxonomy for new information that came out of the learning department. That if they had had that upfront, it could have served both training and technical docs at the same time. So thinking about that and doing that planning is one of the best ways to avoid having to do rework on a taxonomy.

AB: And I’m glad you brought up the gathering of feedback and insight from users before diving into building out a taxonomy. Because at the end of the day, you want it to be usable to the people who need that classification system. That is the most important part.