I do my best to keep the “Upcoming Classes” link as up to date as possible. As the classes are scheduled and registration links are live, I put them on there. If I know something is underway, but not quite live yet, I may still add it to that page with an ETA.
Though I think of myself as an author first, these classes do comprise a large part of my new career. They pay the bills and I spend about 50-75% of my workday working on them! Usually, they dovetail with the things I’m writing about, and I research for both things at the same time.
I took a VIA Strengths finder test years ago, and both “Teaching” and “Learning” were particular strengths of mine. I think that this work on courses to offer is a huge part of expressing those strengths and feeling accomplished at the end of the day.
Morbid Anatomy Classes
I was introduced to Morbid Anatomy by a friend of mine, Amy Slonaker, who has been friends with the creators of the group for a long time. I’d attended a handful of sessions, and enjoyed the other attendees, as well as the topics that they cover. When Amy offered to introduce me to Joanna, the founder and main driving force behind the organization, I jumped at the chance.
The coolest part of teaching for Morbid Anatomy is that I can expand my audience and potential reach exponentially. They have almost a half a million followers full of smart, interesting, creative people. It’s a fabulous group of people to teach and to become friends with and collaborators with going forward.
Being able to choose my course topics and classes is another huge plus. I choose what to teach! We negotiate on dates a little bit, to make sure the schedule works for everyone. But generally speaking, I drive my own show there.
In terms of workload, I spend a few hours each week actively teaching a session and following up on emails about the active session, a few hours researching and preparing the syllabus and presentations for upcoming courses, and sometimes a little bit of time organizing and ideating upcoming course ideas to pitch.
Right now I have about 1 course per month on the books, and I’d like to continue that pace into 2025.
- July and August – [SOLD OUT!] Fairy Tale Retelling Course currently underway
- August – Grim Grimm and Women’s Trauma
- September 9th – FREE Event about the Connections between the Unicorn and the Monstrous Feminine
- September – October – The Monstrous Feminine
- October-November – The Fairy tale retelling course (I’m offering it again, since the first one sold out)
I plan to take a break in December, and then pick back up in January 2025 with new courses. The fun part, of course, will be thinking about what else to offer in the meantime! These ideas are often based on my research and writing projects. If there’s a mythology topic you’d be interested in taking a course about, please comment and let me know!
Thinkific Classes About Burnout
Right now, the courses that are gobbling up most of my workday are a set of asynchronous, on-demand courses that I’m creating on the Thinkific platform.
I’m doing this process in a quick and dirty way. I created a “minimum viable product” or MVP version, which I offer for free. That course is about 1 hour of video, and it is aimed at helping individuals who think they are suffering from burnout. The idea of an MVP is to move as quickly as possible, make notes of lessons learned and to fail forward into the next version. I posted about my lessons learned a few weeks ago.
Version #2 then, is a course I’ve launched that is aimed at helping people managers to prevent their own teams from burning out. This course is not going to be free, and it’s about 3 hours of edited video, so I had to apply all of the lessons in real time to get this going.
The main idea here is that I won’t be creating these courses forever. There won’t be an ongoing need to spend hours of every day with video edits, background music, PDF downloads, closed caption uploads, and detailed supporting materials. Once I create this course, I won’t need to update it until the book comes out. I might have additional time to spend marketing and learning how to get sign-ups, but I probably won’t have to adjust the meat of the course.
Again, I’ll “fail forward” with this one as I make the next. The next, by the way, is either what human resources can do to prevent employee burnout or what the c-suite can do to prevent employee burnout. I’m not sure which set of videos I’ll be making next.
The fourth (and perhaps final) asynchronous burnout training I want to offer will go back to the beginning – a free 1-hour course aimed at autistic burnout recovery. This is more because I just genuinely want to help people, rather than as a way to build a marketing funnel.
The other trainings, though, are ultimately targeted at selling the burnout book when it comes out, and at upselling workshops for companies. The idea is that I could also offer these training sessions in person!