Nina Jackson Mitchell, M.S.

Nina Jackson Mitchell, M.S., is a criminal justice professor, learning and development professional, course designer, trainer, speaker, and doctoral candidate in Applied Learning Sciences at the University of Miami. For more than a decade, she has designed learning experiences that help people move beyond simply knowing information to applying it with confidence, sound judgment, and purpose.

Nina's journey in learning and development began in the travel industry, where teaching others how to build successful travel businesses grew into years of training, coaching, onboarding, leadership development, curriculum development, and learning design. Working with adult learners across different backgrounds, experience levels, and geographic locations became an early laboratory for understanding how people learn, why some training transfers to performance while other training does not, and what learners need to turn information into action.

Over the past 10 years, that work has expanded from travel and professional training into higher education and criminal justice education. Nina currently serves as a criminal justice professor at Georgia Piedmont Technical College, where she teaches, advises students, designs courses, and creates learning experiences that connect academic knowledge to professional practice. Her approach challenges students to move beyond memorizing laws, terminology, policies, and procedures and toward applying knowledge through critical thinking, ethical decision-making, problem-solving, and professional judgment.

Her work sits at the intersection of criminal justice, higher education, learning science, instructional design, workforce development, and human performance. She believes rigorous learning can also be inclusive, that technology should support rather than replace human thinking, and that education should prepare people not merely to answer questions correctly but to navigate situations in which the answer is not obvious.