if you're looking to design comprehensive learning experiences or become an instructional designer then you're going to want to know about Gagne's nine events Gagne's nine events include all of the research-backed conditions that are necessary for learning to take place so you can use these events to craft lesson plans or create your e-learning storyboards and these events are really good especially for new instructional designers because they're very concrete and they can serve almost as a blueprint for your learning experience so let's dive into it here are the nine events and we are going to cover each one of these in detail so the first one up is gain attention now I want to say all these events they don't have to necessarily be done in order but most of the time you do want to start by gaining your audience's attention and this can be done in in quite a few ways I think Gagne presents this as a change in stimulus with a simple example of like turning the lights on and off in a classroom to direct everyone's attention to the learning experience but you can also do this with an engaging story with maybe an engaging video animation audio clip or even interaction and a thought-provoking question just to again orient people to the learning experience and try to get everyone focused on what's about to come so you can be creative with how you gain attention but you do want to you know you do want to pay attention to this event because if you're just diving right into some really dry content people probably aren't going to be super attentive to it the next event is to state objectives so you really want to answer the question like what are the people going to learn in this learning experience what are they going to accomplish by the end of this and the biggest mistake people make here is they prevent the very dry Bloom’s taxonomy learning objectives that you would use to guide your design these you don't need to present your instructional design objectives to your audience those are for you to make your design decisions when it comes to stating the objectives you want to keep it conversational you know today you'll learn about this by the end of this you'll know how to do this we don't need to say you know you'll be able to recognize each of these three facets like identify this and that again keep it conversational keep it simple just try to let them know where you're going with the learning experience the third event is to stimulate recall so from a cognitivist perspective you learn by connecting new knowledge and new skills to knowledge and skills that you already have in your long-term memory so your job as the instructional designer or the facilitator is you want to bring that pre-existing knowledge into the working memory so that when the new you know when you present the new information and the new knowledge and the new skills it's much easier to connect those two pieces and encode that into long-term memory so again this is cognitive information processing theory we don't need to dive super far into it from a practical perspective though you want to ask questions that cause people to draw on their pre-existing knowledge and maybe refer to that pre-existing knowledge throughout the course so you know this might be as simple as referring to things that you learned in the previous lesson or it might be referring to things that you would have learned like you know decades ago or years ago the idea here is bringing any of that relevant info that the people have to the forefront so that it's easier to learn and connect the new information and you want to add that into your lesson plan or your design alright this fourth event is to present content I think that most teachers, facilitators, and designers are familiar with this piece yeah you know use a blend of media if you can chunk it well so that you're not jumping all over the place with your content try to keep it aligned with your objective so that you're not including anything irrelevant or unnecessary again we don't need to spend a ton of time on presenting content alright the fifth event is to provide guidance a lot of designers get i've seen get confused with this part but really this is like the supporting you know scaffolding is one way to do this in the in the beginning of the experience you provide more guidance by maybe you help people see the reasoning behind certain answers or behind certain approaches you give them practice questions that might start off more simple and you and you know you provide more information to the why and guide them to the right answer that's what we're referring to here also mnemonic devices so like PEMDAS when you're learning like the order of operations in math class it's like please excuse my dear aunt sally yeah just little tips and tricks to remember things to learn the information to practice the skills you know I have your tips about how to study or learn the material maybe you're suggesting that they make flash cards pieces like that you know pieces that aren't exactly presenting the content but helping people learn that content in an efficient way that's the guidance and that is a necessary piece to designing a learning experience alright up next we have elicit performance another way to think about that it this is to provide practice opportunities so people learn new skills when they can actually practice those skills and it's up to you as a designer to make sure that those practice opportunities are there this is important you know it's low risk if they fail a practice question or a practice quiz or something it's not the end of the world they can just try again and yeah that's all there really is to it make sure that people have a chance to practice don't just dump the content on them providing feedback it goes hand in hand with providing those practice opportunities you want to provide the feedback as soon as possible so when someone is off track or when they are answering questions incorrectly they can get feedback as to why and they can adjust accordingly to get closer to where they need to be and get closer to that instructional goal so that's that's the real point here give people a chance to learn from their mistakes you can give people all the practice in the world but if they're practicing incorrectly and they don't know why or how to do it the right way then you're not really helping them so make sure that feedback is tied to that performance or that practice very closely next up we have assess performance so this is usually comes at the at the end of the experience it's when we want to see okay did this person actually learn anything and a common way to do this is with these multiple choice questions or assessments but you can also do this with observation for things that are a bit more visual when you can see someone performing it correctly and we can go much deeper into this but that's the main idea here when you're assessing that performance and seeing if someone actually did learn what they're supposed to learn you're getting useful data for both the the person going through that learning experience and the instructor or the designer so the person going through the experience if they fail that assessment at the end it gives them a pretty good idea of okay i'm not ready I need to go back and study this information more I need to look at some other sources maybe get some coaching so that I can get on the right track with this and if you're the designer and you're seeing people not pass that assessment it can give you some useful data about how to improve that learning experience or improve that assessment to make it more in line with the learning objectives and finally one of my favorites enhance transfer and retention so you know you have this learning experience maybe it's anywhere between 10 and 60 minutes long maybe longer maybe shorter but you want people to take away what they learned and use it on the job or in real life so one of the best ways to do this is to mirror the performance context so imagine the situation where the person is going to have to actually use this new knowledge or these new skills and try to mirror that situation in the learning experience so this is good for you know simulations when you when you really put someone in that same situation they would be in in real life and then you you give them the guidance they need to use those those skills and that knowledge in that real world context job aids are another great way to do this you know you just learned what you learned over this past 30 minutes or so now you can get it on this nice one page job aid and take that with you to the job and you can see now that enhanced transfer use the job aid as like a connector between the learning experience and the actual job so you can quickly reference it without having to go back and spend another 30 minutes doing that learning experience over again whenever you need a quick refresher and finally yeah this is the idea relate the content to the real world situations help people see how they'll be able to use what it is that they're learning in the real world so I hope that helped those are Gagne's nine events again they can be used in any order you probably want to be thinking about these things at every stage of your design process when you actually are designing that experience you want to weave these things throughout and with that being said I have worked with clients and companies who've had storyboard templates that follow these events almost to a t so it starts with getting that attention it leads into stating those objectives then you know there's a section about stimulating recall and it kind of just goes through this like in order and that's completely fine especially if you are a newer instructional designer or you haven't designed a learning experience before just try following this in order and checking all the boxes and seeing how you do because this is a lot better than just you know presenting a 45-minute powerpoint presentation like kind of like what i'm doing now not 45 minutes but you get the idea you can design something much more comprehensive and effective by addressing each one of Gagne's nine events so if this was helpful please go ahead and like the video and if you are interested in becoming an instructional designer you can check out my full video on that topic which I will link in the description below so thanks for watching and I will see you in the next video