Uptick set out to find the one lesson structure to rule them all. One structure to guide a lesson and tick all the boxes to help your students stay interested, motivated and excited to learn more. At the same time you would be more confident and sure that you are providing the best lessons you can, effortlessly.

One structure to rule them all?

In my search for coming up with the best way of structuring online courses I have come across many different ways of creating a single class.

Most course creators just wing it, diving right into the content without thinking about the level of skill the students will have or what information they already have or lack. Most importantly there is no “attention grabbing” up front, no reasons why this class is a better use of time over other learning materials

For any learning content to be successful it is important to remember what you are up against. Thousands of pieces of “content” are launched every minute. If you don’t catch the interest of your audience in the first couple of seconds they’ll move on.

Ramit Sethi introducing the course “Earnable”

Today we are looking at a timeless structure that has been proven to work for the last 60+ years by organisations like “Berkeley Lab Training” and at international universities. Also, prolific course creators like Ramit Sethi and Maria Coz use elements of this structure to create online courses that work.

At the end of this article you will be able to effortlessly create online course lessons that spark engagement, keep the students engaged and creates a successful learning experience. All this without worrying about whether you’re presenting the material at the right level and questioning yourself.

The framework provides a skeleton for any lesson to make it much easier to present your material, tick all the boxes and create learning materials. Almost like a cookbook to follow, step by step.

A few more benefits to this approach:

  • Link your materials to previous knowledge to make it easier for your students to learn
  • Help students to use the material in real world situations (the main reason they are there). Giving them real expertise instead of empty learnings.
  • Use low stress assessments to spark engagement and to help students learn.

Introducing Gagne’s Nine Events — A timeless proven lesson structure

Based on Gagne’s real-world research from the 1960s, the nine events were written to make it easier for teachers, trainers and professional instructional designers to create great learning experiences.

Since the model has survived and thrived since the 60s we can speculate that it works similarly to the way humans naturally learn and become experts. Remember that the ultimate goal here is that the student gets a result from your courses, that way they will talk to other students and recommend you, they will comment and engage with your content and eventually become one of your true fans — a real sustainable way of doing business.

Cons to any model?

Critics say that the systematic approach of the nine events leaves little space for the wonder and magic of teaching. Here at Uptick we see it as an easy way to take care of the structure and have more time to implement magic and multimedia in the content itself.

Gagne’s 9 events for online courses

Event 1-3 – Setting the scene

These first 3 events gets the students attention, tells them what they will learn and helps link the knowledge the student might already have.

The goal in this first part of the nine events is to keep the student super focused, interested and engaged by giving them a look at the delicious stuff that is to come. Secondly, to tell them what they will learn and how it can get them to their learning goal. And finally to remind them of what they already know so they can build on it.

Step 0: The unofficial Uptick step to creating a great lesson:

Before the nine steps it is important to have a clear learning objective in mind. A goal that the student can work towards that all the steps help the student to get to.

This lesson goal is essential in helping the student achieve the module goal, which is essential for the goal of the entire course.

Event 1: Grab their attention

You see this in ads, in great speeches and in trailers.

No matter how dry or boring the subject you are teaching, there is some aspect of it that can be amplified. The skilled teacher will use personal stories, video clips, memes, anything unusual and interest grabbing to break the monotony and get the student focused.

Here are a couple of questions you can ask about your content:

  • What would I say to “sell” this topic to a friend?
  • What is a youtube video, an audio clip or a quote that comes to mind?
  • What is unusual about this?
  • Do I have a real-world personal story to tell?
  • Can I use visuals to support this story?
Tiago Forte introducing the contents of the current lesson

Event 2: What will they learn?

Here we give them an overview of what they will learn. You can say: “In this lesson you will learn to:”

Make sure you show how this lesson will help them get to their end goal: the goal of the module and the course. If it is not obvious you should make sure you spend some extra time here.

Examples:

  • By the end of this lesson you will know how to create a consistent meditation practice, so you can Y — remember a consistent practice is the key to becoming mindful in your day to day.
  • What I am about to teach you will make keeping track of your personal finances automatic so you can focus on earning more and become financially free.

Event 3: Link to existing knowledge

Existing knowledge of the topic is very important. For you as a teacher the number one thing to assess is what the student already knows and for the student it is critical in determining how easily they can learn something new.

Starting out, your course content will assume some level of knowledge, but down the line you will get feedback to indicate if you need to adjust this starting point. You can even start out by providing a little mini course within the course to get less advanced students up to speed.

Event 4-6: While you teach

Ramit presenting the content

Event 4: Presenting the content

Step 4 and finally you are presenting the new content. This is where online course creators usually start.

Make sure you limit the material to only include what is necessary to achieve the lesson goal, anything else can be saved for a bonus lesson or a lesson that needs the information.

Also, try to use a variety of media to make sure the material is interesting and engaging.

Event 5: Guided practice

This step is all about showing the student the correct actions to achieve the lesson goal. Use lots of examples, case studies and graphics to make the learning real.

This is where you as a teacher can get creative. Anything you can do to make the student use the new material in a guided way, here are some ideas:

  • Can they follow a checklist you have provided to perform the action themselves?
  • Can you set up a task that requires them to use what they just learned?
  • Instead of having the students repeat what they just learned, make them use the content in a different real-world context.

You are still helping and guiding them, they are not on their own yet.

In a study of the nine events, 256 college students were tested after having been taught using random collections of the nine events (DOI 10.1111/j.1467-8535.2006.00670.x). One group received the full program, while 5 other groups received a program that was missing a step. The “practice with feedback” step was shown to be the most important for raising the scores of the students (the mean score was around 17.6 for the full program and 14.9 for the lessons without practice)

Event 6: Independent performance

This is a super important part of making learnings stick, immediately using the new content to perform a real action — actually using the content. To take the learnings from theory to practice.

This step is critical in solidifying the new material in their mind and enables them to acquire the skills to use the material in the real world. This can help the student make sure that they have understood the material.

Idea:

  • Group discussions are great to engage learners, in an online course you can use a forum like circle.so or a discord server

Event 7-9: After the presentation

Thincific has surveys to assess your students, they can even be exported to excel files.

Event 7: Provide feedback

The students have practiced with your guidance and on their own. This is the chance to correct any errors and give the student valuable information about how they are doing. Without the information of how they are doing you leave them wondering whether they did it right and if they are on the right track.

Taking any learning and applying it to the real world can be challenging, your feedback serves to make it easier to accomplish the lesson goal and after that the module and course goal.

If you see a lot of students having issues with one specific part of a module you can create a minicourse or a FAQ that helps with these problems.You can include “”You’ve now completed…” messages and encouragement.

Feedback from other learners can also be very helpful.

Ideas:

  • Assessing each student in an online setting can be hard to scale. A peer assessment where students post their version of the learning put into practice in a forum often works well.
  • Another way is to use the automatic quizzes on course platforms so that the student can measure how they are doing.

Event 8: Assessment

Here the students get feedback on how they did. This can be thought of as a milestone assessment.

Similar to the previous assessment this step helps the student figure out what they have learned and what needs more work. It also helps the teaching tweak their lesson to better suit the student — to create a better lesson to achieve the lesson goal.

Event 9: Maximizing retention and learning

A critical step in helping students use what they have learned in a wider real-world context. For example in a Spanish language course you could facilitate speaking with native speakers.

Ideas:

  • Can you use real world practice of the material?
  • Can you have the students periodically engage with practice of the learned material?
  • Can you provide a pdf that the student can bring along to continuously refer back to in real-world situations?
Tiaho Forte setting up an assignment make the lesson stick

Next steps

Here at Uptick we say that no lesson plan ever survived first contact with students. It is easy to create a perfect structure on your screen, but when it comes to actually delivering the content in real life your approach will change based on the skill level of the group, the speed you are delivering the content with and how you relate to the material.

As an online course teacher it is important to stay flexible and ready to change material based on the feedback you get from your students. Your recorded lessons should be just a version 1 out of many as you get closer to the best way to teach the material.

Conclusion

You now have an overview of how best to structure a course lesson and tick all the boxes as you move towards the perfect lesson.

Armed with this tool-set you will likely find yourself being more sure of your abilities as a teacher and planning will become so much easier.

As a bonus we have created a worksheet that you can download here:

Please let us know in the comments if this was helpful to you and how you will structure your next lesson!