An instructional designer and a professor of communication collaborated to develop an asynchronous, online course using Gagné’s nine events of instruction. Employing the course description and learning outcomes from the existing face-to-face course, collaborators used Gagné’s approach, in conjunction with the Backward Design approach to create a blueprint that might be useful in the development of other online courses. The purpose of this paper is to describe the implementation and illustrate the efficacy of activities and assessments created for each of Gagné’s approach in the development of the online Nonverbal Communication course. This paper also proposes a future research plan to determine the relevance of Gagné’s approach in a current online course by gathering students’ perspectives of those course activities, along with collecting and analyzing course assessments to ascertain how students performed within the framework of the nine events.