Hi! Designing an eLearning program for adult learners with varying levels of prior knowledge can be quite a challenge, but don’t worry, you’re not alone! One effective strategy is to implement a competency-based approach. This means identifying the key skills or knowledge areas required and breaking them down into manageable learning objectives. By clearly defining the desired outcomes, you can align the content and activities to cater to different levels of prior knowledge. Let me know if this works for you!

Captivate offers the possibility of a pretest, but that option has some disadvantages.

Personally I always prefer to give control as much as possible to the learner (had a long career as university college professor), for sure since you are talking about adult learners. Why not offer them the possibility to skip part of the content slides based on some answers given by them (like a survey)? Captivate has a system variable cpQuizInfoAnswerChoice or you can use user variables to set up branching based on the answers. In this blog post I described an example in another situation where I use the system variable for branching:

https://blog.lilybiri.com/using-cpquizinfoanswerchoice-for-survey-conversion-from-swf-to-html

Have you considered offering a test out option?

If they pass – they are done.

If they fail – they have to take the course.