Demo course: Teaching in the Virtual Environment

The SOLO taxonomy stands for:

Structure of
Observed
Learning
Outcomes

It was developed by Biggs and Collis (1982), and is well described in Biggs and Tang (2007)

It describes level of increasing complexity in a student's understanding of a subject, through five stages, and it is claimed to be applicable to any subject area. Not all students get through all five stages, of course, and indeed not all teaching (and even less "training" is designed to take them all the way).

There are fairly clear links not only with Säljö on conceptions of learning, but also, in the emphasis on making connections and contextualising, with Bateson's levels of learning, and even with Bloom's taxonomy in the cognitive domain.