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