An Advance Organizer Approach to Distance Learning Course Presentation

The idea of the advance organizer was suggested by Ausubel (1968) well before hypermedia, distance learning initiatives, etc., became pervasive. Ausubel suggests that advance organizers might foster meaningful learning by prompting the student regarding pre-existing superordinate concepts that are already in the student's cognitive structure, and by otherwise providing a context of general concepts into which the student can incorporate progressively differentiated details. Ausubel claims that by presenting a global representation of the knowledge to be learned, advance organizers might foster "integrative reconciliation" of the subdomains of knowledge the ability to understand interconnections among the basic concepts in the domain. This paper describes a new approach to distance learning course delivery based upon advance organizers.