The Course Kitchen team includes freelance learning and development professionals with exceptionally diverse professional and academic backgrounds. This richness allows us to serve clients from varying sectors and with varying needs.
New and aspiring learning designers: Our team is always growing, and we love to coach and mentor less-experienced learning designers. At Course Kitchen, we develop learning experiences and learning designers. Send us your resume if you’d like to shadow an upcoming project.
Bonnie Budd, Ed.D. (2018)
Owner and Chief Chef
Bonnie created Course Kitchen in 2016 to provide organizations with access to the best learning and development professionals in the field. She is the only full-time team member, serving as the primary point of contact for clients as a consultant, designer, developer, and project manager, and she has never been happier! Over the last ten years (give or take), Bonnie helped to launch and improve learning design initiatives in academic, financial, healthcare, and research organizations. She is committed to the continuous improvement of learning experiences whenever and wherever they occur.
Professional Background
Education
Personal
Along with her husband, stepson, and puppies Piper and Timber, Bonnie spends a lot of time in her quiet backyard overlooking beautiful conservation land in the Blackstone Valley of Massachusetts. She loves to cook, especially with friends willing to tackle really complicated dishes, a joy she discovered upon starting
Neighbor Dinners in St Louis. Bonnie owns a banjo with dreams of knowing how to play it someday, but so far it just looks pretty in the living room.
You can connect with Bonnie via LinkedIn, on Twitter @drbonniebudd, or via email at bonnie@coursekitchen.com.
Amy Beal Burns, M.L.S., G.C.
Junior Learning Designer, Quality Reviewer
Amy has spent most of her career in academic libraries teaching students how to locate, evaluate, and use information, an important task in this era of freely available information in which the line between fact and opinion has become blurred. She is currently leading a team of librarians creating online tutorials for use in high-demand college courses. Working with adults from all over the world at a large urban community college has helped her understand the importance of making learning accessible to those from multiple cultural backgrounds and socioeconomic levels.
Professional Background
Education
Personal
Amy and her husband live in Concord, North Carolina near the Charlotte Motor Speedway, even though she is (sadly) not a NASCAR fan. They have 2 sons who live near enough to drop their black labs off for dog sitting. She is very lucky to have good friends, one of whom loves to make travel plans. Amy recently traveled to Scotland, Venice, Italy, the Greek islands, and Oak Island, North Carolina. Next up: the Azores! Amy and her husband are currently updating their home, which is taking a lot more money and time than they expected…
You can connect with Amy via LinkedIn.
Annmarie Dumont, M.Ed.
Learning Designer, Senior Trainer, Facilitator
Annmarie loves the process of creating excellent workplace learning experiences for leaders, educators, and individual contributors in a variety of fields. Whether the learning context is instructor-led, online, or a blend of the two, she enjoys the challenge of breaking down topics to reveal their purpose for the end-learner, creating an approach that is unexpected and interactive.
Professional Background
Annmarie has spent her career educating adults with interactive, engaging, blended learning experiences. Most recently, she spent two years working under a federal contract with the
Massachusetts Department of Correction (DOC) as a Senior Instructional Designer. In collaboration with content experts, she developed a seven-module program for investigators working under the
Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) and led the creation of a three-day national conference for over 300 corrections professionals. Prior to her work with DOC, she managed the School-Based Claiming team with the
Center for Healthcare Financing at the
University of Massachusetts Medical School, developing blended learning experiences for educators across the state. She has also designed educational programs on such varied topics as substance abuse prevention, tobacco control, and the
Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).
Education
Annmarie earned a B.S. in Public Health and an M.A. in Education from
UMass Amherst, and an M.Ed. in Instructional Design from
UMass Boston.
Personal
Annmarie lives in a beautiful, rural neighborhood in Western Massachusetts where she and her husband enjoy biking, kayaking, hiking, and peaceful evenings by the firepit. They love to travel and recently spent an epic week touring the Arizona deserts.
You can connect with Annmarie via LinkedIn.
Paula Galvin, M.Ed.
Learning Designer, Project Manager
Paula believes there are many paths to learning and instruction. She has been involved in the creation and delivery of adult learning experiences for more than twenty years, from classrooms to cell blocks. She is a firm believer in identifying and building toward learner motivation with agile and creative instructional strategies.
Professional Background
Paula currently serves as the Online Learning Manager and Instructional Designer for the University of Arizona College of Nursing (UACON), focused on Professional Education initiatives. Before joining UACON, Paula was an Instructional Designer at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences where she supported faculty use of instructional technology. Prior to this role, Paula spent nearly twenty years working in communications and public education as Assistant Director for the Community Alliance for Teen Safety, Director of Communications and Marketing for Granite State College, and Public Relations Program Coordinator for the University of New Hampshire.
Education
Following an extended gap year, Paula eventually earned a B.A. in Humanities from the University of New Hampshire and an M.Ed. in Instructional Design from UMass Boston. She is currently pursuing an M.A. in Professional Writing at Northern Arizona University.
Personal
Paula relocated to Tucson, Arizona in 2012 where she tolerates the triple-digit heat and misses the Atlantic Ocean. Her kitchen is stocked with locally pastured and harvested products from the region’s many cattle ranches. When not at work, she can be found exploring the parks, trails, and forest service roads of Southern Arizona with her two rescue dogs, Brisco and Logan. During her extended gap year, Paula worked in cafés and bakeries from coast to coast across the U.S. and mastered the 12-layer mocha latte before anyone knew about Starbucks!
You can connect with Paula via LinkedIn.
Joanna Miller, MA
Learning Designer, Interactive Developer
Joanna focuses on designing training that meets business goals and offers learners interactive, memorable experiences. She thrives on the challenge of creating effective programs that incorporate elements of synchronous and self-paced online learning, peer-to-peer practice, manager feedback and certification, even in environments where stakeholders have limited budgets and learners have little time.
Professional Background
While working for a major international retailer, Joanna conceptualized and developed an award-winning video that changed the way salespeople around the world sold a class of products. She has designed software, soft skills, manufacturing and regulatory training for startups, global companies and universities.
Education
Personal
Long a resident of Massachusetts, Joanna lives in a sunny spot south of Boston. She is an enthusiastic gardener.
Julie Smith Riley, M.S.
Consultant, Learning Designer, Teacher, Faculty Partner
Julie is a teaching and learning geek with an insatiable curiosity about how to marry technology and pedagogy in innovative ways to deliver high-quality, engaging, and effective learning experiences. Julie has 15 years’ experience developing innovative, high-quality online, blended and classroom courses for non-profit, for-profit and higher education organizations. She is especially passionate about applying evidence-based learning principles to the design and facilitation of learning experiences and designing learning that results in behavior change.
Professional Background
Education
Personal
Julie lives on a farm in rural Ohio. She loves to cook and host dinner parties and balances out her screen time by retreating to her workshop to make jewelry or walking the farm with her camera and her pup, Uma.
You can connect with Julie via
LinkedIn.
Sarah A. Smith, M.S., M.B.A.
Lead Learning Designer, Graphic Designer, Interactive Developer
By happenstance, Sarah found a rewarding alignment between graphic design and creating instructional systems. She was managing a learning lab and saw students printing hundreds of PowerPoint slides which destroyed her printers. Asking the students’ instructor if she could turn the static slides into a dynamic website was the birth of a new passion. The site reversed students’ remediation and saved her printers! Since then, Sarah’s career has focused on facilitating learning and integrating technology with teaching. She has presented internationally on designing training methods for higher education faculty to transition traditional courses to blended and online models.
Professional Background
Sarah has over 14 years developing and implementing a wide array of instructional technology training and professional development opportunities at all levels of expertise.
Most recently, Sarah was the Program Manager for Blended Learning at Babson Executive Education, where she created and implemented online and blended programs to custom clients. Prior to Babson, she was an Instructional Designer for Suffolk University’s Center for Teaching and Scholarly Excellence where she designed and implemented several multi-day Blended and Online Course Design Institutes that train the fundamentals of blended teaching and learning. As the Instructional Technologist at Curry College, Sarah integrated technology into the curriculum. Starting as an Academic Computing Specialist, she pursued her first graduate degree and advanced professionally to an Instructional Designer at the University of Connecticut Health Center. Education
Personal
Finding a quiet retreat in the Houghs Neck neighborhood of Quincy, Massachusetts, Sarah purchased a fixer-upper and adopted a puppy! Sarah works on the landscape while Frankie chases squirrels. The inside repairs always take a back seat on nice days. In her free time, Sarah is a console gamer and enjoys co-op games on her Xbox.
You can connect with Sarah via LinkedIn and on Twitter @s_almyra_smith.
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