§ ABOUT — INDEPENDENT SINCE 2016 DR. BONNIE BUDD, FOUNDER

A studio of one principal,
a network of senior craftspeople,
and zero interest in pitching.

↓ READ ON № 02 / ABOUT
§ 01 — FOUNDER CV ON FILE

Twenty years in learning design.
Ten running this studio.

Bonnie Budd, EdD, founded Course Kitchen in 2016 after leading teams and design projects inside higher ed and corporate L&D — at universities and Fortune 500 learning teams. The studio exists because she got tired of watching big agencies bill enterprise rates for junior work.

Today Course Kitchen ships courses for clients who care more about learner outcomes than slide counts. Every project is led by Bonnie. The bench (motion designers, voice talent, accessibility auditors, LMS engineers) is hand-picked, senior, and contracted in only when the project calls for it.

Outside the studio: faculty appointments in instructional design, occasional conference talks, an embarrassingly large cookbook collection.

§ 02 — HOW WE WORK FOUR RULES, NO EXCEPTIONS

Four operating principles
that actually show up in the work.

01

Senior people only

Every line of script, every screen, every line of code is written by someone with at least a decade of experience. No juniors learning on your dime.

02

Code we’d ship for ourselves

Clean SCORM, semantic HTML, documented build files. If we wouldn’t be proud to inherit it, we don’t ship it to you.

03

Estimates we honor

Fixed-fee whenever possible. If scope changes, we tell you before we touch the work — no surprise invoices, ever.

04

Accessibility by default

WCAG 2.2 AA is the floor, not the ceiling. We design for screen readers, keyboard users, and cognitive load from day one — not as a remediation pass.

§ 03 — TIMELINE 10 YEARS and counting

The studio,
year by year.

  1. 2016

    Course Kitchen founded

    Solo studio launches with first three executive leadership programs for Analog Devices.

  2. 2018

    First global engagement

    On-site learning analysis for Groupon in the Phillipines. Shipped on time, became a repeat-client relationship with contracting agency, Learning Tribes.

  3. 2023

    First degree programs

    Two fully online Master of Science degree programs for Bryant University designed and built over 18 months with tenured faculty and on-campus developers.

  4. 2024

    80+ courses shipped, zero missed deadlines

    Studio expands into rescue-and-rebuild engagements for inherited courses that need triage.

  5. 2026

    Currently booking Q3 / Q4

    Limited slots for new project-based engagements and embedded retainers.

§ 04 — TALK SHOP REPLIES WITHIN 1 BUSINESS DAY

Want to talk shop?
Dr. Budd reads every email.

Whether you’ve got a course that needs to ship, a program that needs rescuing, or just a question about instructional design, we’d genuinely like to hear from you.

NOTES FROM THE KITCHEN ONE EMAIL A MONTH

Stay in touch.

Once a month, a short note on what is actually working in instructional design — accessibility, AI in course development, and the boring craft details that decide whether a course ships well. No funnels, no upsells.

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