A new bloom – adding ‘collaborate’ to Bloom’s taxonomy

There are a number of opportunities for collaboration, within and between universities, locally, internationally, with industry and with other education providers. University graduates are likely to be placed in a work environment where collaboration is required. Collaboration within higher education institutions has been shown to enhance student learning, and collaborative learning to improve student outcomes. A proposal has been made to add ‘collaborate’ to Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, to emphasise the importance of collaboration and to encourage its inclusion in the educational process and assessment. Collaborate is sited between ‘apply’ and ‘analyse’ in the revised Bloom’s taxonomy hierarchy, and the new version named the New Bloom. This opinion piece expands on the concept and adds the specific objective of ‘work or share with others’ with keywords ‘share, cooperate, reciprocate, achieve consensus’. It also offers a non-hierarchical representation of the taxonomy, with collaborate as an important feature of each of the other components. Adding collaborate to Bloom’s Taxonomy is recommended to emphasise the importance of collaboration and its contribution to each of the other components of the taxonomy.


Introduction
This opinion piece expands on a proposal (Heller, 2022) to add 'collaborate' to Bloom's Taxonomy, to emphasise the importance of collaboration and to encourage its inclusion in the processes of higher education and its assessment.

Why collaborate?
There are a number of opportunities for collaboration, within and between universities, locally, internationally, with industry and with other education providers. University graduates are likely to be placed in a work environment where collaboration is required.
Collaboration within higher education institutions has been shown to enhance student learning (Kezar, 2005), and there is considerable evidence that collaborative learning improves student outcomes (Laal and Ghodsi, 2012;Scager et al., 2016 The dangers of competition rather than collaboration in education include unnecessary duplication of courses, and failure to embrace best practice as each institution develops its own variant rather than building on success. Most important is the failure to consider the whole ecosystem, as providers compete rather than come together to meet local, national or global educational needs (Mintz, 2019

Digital opportunities for collaboration
The digital economy has offered many opportunities for collaboration, as is emphasised in the OECD report (OECD, 2019). The creation and sharing of Open Educational Resources (UNESCO, 2017) is an example of the way in which information can be shared online to allow collaboration rather than competition. As online education becomes increasingly Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, Issue 24: September 2022 3 utilised in the educational process, either in full or in hybrid models, the potential for collaboration increases. A proposed new model for the higher education sector (Heller, 2022) is enabled by a pivot to online education, as is the field of Networked Learning (Networked Learning Editorial Collective, 2021)both of these approaches include collaboration as a key feature.

Teaching collaboration
If we accept that there are benefits from collaboration within and between universities, as well as with other players, it would make sense to both teach collaboration to university students and provide opportunities that would facilitate collaboration. There are a number of structural and organisational ways in which collaboration can be facilitated. However, unless collaboration is taught and assessed, it is unlikely to assume importance in the university setting. In order to emphasise the importance of including collaboration in our teaching, the suggestion was made (Heller, 2022a) to add collaboration to Bloom's taxonomy, and this commentary expands on that idea. Laurillard (Laurillard's Conversational Framework) includes collaboration as one of her learning types, and she has also indicated how online technology can support collaboration (Laurillard et al., 2018).

Bloom's taxonomy
Bloom's taxonomy has been in use for many years to help us define the outcomes we Collaboration does not appear in either version, although a further revision to a digital taxonomy did add collaboration as a separate element, and gave an example of collaboration in the use of digital tools for sharing within the 'applying' rubric (Churches, 2008). Since that paper was written, there have been major advances in the availability of digital software to facilitate collaboration.

Adding 'collaborate' to Bloom's taxonomy
The suggestion to add collaboration as a key component in a further revision to Bloom's taxonomy has been made and this new version termed the New Bloom (Heller, 2022a).
The New Bloom adds the term 'collaborate' and places it between 'apply' and 'analyse'

Further detail on the taxonomy
The Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching is among others who have expanded the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy to include more detail in order to help the educational process by defining specific objectives and keywords (Armstrong, 2010). It might be worth a short digression on terminology. Bloom titled his taxonomy as relating to educational objectives, although they are not formulated in the way we usually term educational objectives today.
They can be thought of as cognitive levels of complexity, or levels of thinking (as in Figure   1). Figure 2 shows the additions of specific objectives with keywords to help with the design and assessment of educational activities.

The hierarchy
Bloom's concept was for a hierarchy of categories from lower to higher. To show that it is a high-level skill, 'collaborate' is placed above 'apply' and before 'analyse'. Each part of the pyramid should inform the next part, so you have to remember to be able to understand, understand to be able to apply, and so on. Placing 'collaborate' before 'analyse', 'evaluate' and 'create' indicates the importance of collaboration in achieving each of these outcomes.
However, it is open to debate as to whether a distinct hierarchical approach is appropriate, and certainly collaboration might also benefit each of the other stages. Even remembering, placed at the lowest end of the hierarchy, might benefit from collaborative learning, which is a recognised educational strategy (Baloche and Brody, 2017). For this reason, Figure 4 represents the taxonomy in a non-hierarchical structure, and places 'collaborate' in the centre to show that it is an important feature in each of the other components of the revised Bloom's taxonomy. Figure 4 also includes the specific objectives and keywords, expanded from those suggested by Vanderbilt to include those for 'collaborate'.