Meet Catrina Mitchum

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Catrina Mitchum. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Catrina below.

Catrina, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.

First and foremost, my purpose is to live life. I found my calling in service by following my interests and looking back for the themes.

When I was in undergrad, I was a reader for a blind professor. I would read student papers, textbooks, bank statements, you name it.

I also took a course on human communication on the internet (this was back in 2004).

Fast forward 2 years and I was in my Master’s program in professional and technical writing, learning how to teach writing at the college level.

A year later, I taught a writing class for the first time.

6 months after that I taught my first online class.

These things don’t seem related, but for me, breaking down gates to learning through transparent and accessible learning experiences, my purpose, is the culmination of all these experiences.

But I didn’t just figure that out. I had to look back and question the things that drove me to enjoy what I was doing, the things that drove my decisions. I had to reflect on what I’d experienced AND what I wanted.

Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?

When I decided to leave higher education, the thing that mattered to me the most was work with purpose. At first, I thought that would be in a traditional job, but after I took my first course out in the wild, I realized there was a need for the course creation industry to understand learning. That I was able to see all the things that were wrong with the course design, but others were blaming themselves for not finishing these content dumps people were calling courses.

And that was when I realized how I could transition my calling to break down gates to learning in a different industry and make an impact. My experience as an instructional designer, user experience researcher, and writing teacher could make that change. Adults embark on a learning journey to make a change, and terrible learning experience design gets in the way.

I support course creators, at any stage of the process, in creating learning experiences for client success. I know they want to help people and put good in the world and don’t always know the best way to go about it. They’re experts in other things. I’m the expert in learning experiences. Together we make fantastic courses by breaking things down into easy steps.

The first step for a new course creator is always having an idea for a course, and my free Course Creation Jumpstart helps with that: https://bit.ly/CourseCreationJumpstart

For folks who have something that’s “meh,” an audit is a good place to start. My specialty is accessibility audits, but I offer a variety of others as well. I’m getting ready to start doing free course reviews on my blog, so if you’re interested in a small glimpse of what an audit looks like, sign up for a review: https://bit.ly/CourseReviewRequest

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The three skills or qualities that have been most impactful on my journey have been following my interests, a willingness to try things out and fail, and creativity.

Following the things I’m interested in has created a unique blend of experiences for me that, even if some experiences were hard, resulted in me being exactly where I want to be. If I hadn’t dug into things I was interested in, who knows where I’d have ended up.

As a small business owner who withdrew from her marketing class in undergrad because it was boring, a willingness to try things out knowing I’ll likely fail the first (100) times, has actually been really freeing. I’ve been loving learning this way, which is how I learned to be a good instructional designer and a good teacher. Play and iterate. Don’t worry about what others think. Everyone is craving “real” right now.

That last one leads into creativity. For a long time, I didn’t think I was creative, but my creativity lies in problem solving and curricular design. Embracing that creativity has been really important to being able to do the work that I do. Creativity is also about play and trying things and then learning from them. Block out time to be creative – to work on things that aren’t “productivity.”

Who is your ideal client or what sort of characteristics would make someone an ideal client for you?

My ideal client cares about the change their course brings for their clients. They might be overwhelmed by all the conflicting advice out there “build it before you sell it!” “sell it before you build it!”; the amount of work they think needs to go into building a quality learning experience; the idea of making changes when they DID take a lot of time to build a course; marketing the course, OH MY! There can be so many moving pieces and they want do it well without burning themselves out in the process. They believe they have some good to put into the world with a course. They might be unsure of how to get started, unsure of how to get unstuck, or unsure how to figure out what’s going wrong.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.cmlearningdesign.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cmlearningdesign/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/catrina-mitchum-learning-design/
• Other: Threads: https://www.threads.net/@cmlearningdesign