Strategically organize and present all course content to leverage the learners’ existing expertise on a topic against the concepts and skills they are going to learn. Maximizing the use of their prior knowledge base can help the learner identify patterns in new material by associating their existing knowledge with new concepts.

This can be accomplished through the following actions:

1
Create a pre-assignment that
activates prior knowledge
before new material is
introduced as a method
of contextualizing new
information.
2
Introduce a topic by
connecting prior knowledge to
the new learning.
3
Present a discussion board
where the learner can engage
and contextualize prior
knowledge with new learning.