Instructional Designer- Partner Specific

This position is not open to applicants residing in or otherwise based in California, New York, Illinois, or Massachusetts. Additionally, applicants must be located in the Eastern, Central, Mountain, or Pacific time zones.

Note to Applicants

We’re looking for professionals who take pride in their work. We know your resume tells part of the story, but our application questions help us understand how you think and work. Because we receive a high volume of applications, only applications with complete, thoughtful responses will be reviewed.

Given the AI restriction on this engagement, described below, we ask that your responses be your own work.
Engagement Details

This is instructional design work, with a twist.

Every project starts with an existing course and a charter that defines exactly what is changing about it. The work is reading that charter closely, translating it into specific revisions in specific places, and executing them cleanly on a short, fixed cycle, without drifting into the parts of the course the charter does not cover.

It calls on the full instructional design skill set: learning theory, alignment, assessment design, accessibility, and SME collaboration. What is distinctive is where the difficulty sits. The hard calls here are about scope and defensibility: deciding what a charter line means in practice, and documenting why you drew the line where you did. It also means finding things you would want to change and leaving them alone. If your instinct when you open a course is to fix everything you find, this engagement will frustrate you. If you can see all of it and still deliver only what the charter covers, documenting the rest for the partner, you should do well here.

You will work with Subject Matter Experts and coordinate with internal teams, including Editorial and Quality Review, ensuring every revision adheres to research-based practice and partner-defined quality standards.

This engagement carries a partner data restriction. No partner course content, materials, or partner-provided information may be entered into, uploaded to, or processed by any AI system, internal or external, at any point during the engagement.

This is an independent contractor engagement (1099). Contractors are free to work with other clients, and accepting one project carries no obligation to accept another. Meeting times are set in advance around each project’s milestones. Outside of those scheduled meetings and agreed deadlines, you determine your own working hours and process for completing the work.
Scope of Work

- Complete a scoped review of the assigned course and map the charter to specific course locations, documenting cascading effects, assumptions, and ambiguities before development begins.

- Deliver a specific list of items requiring SME input before the first working session.

- Collaborate with SMEs to revise instruction and assessments in scope, aligned to learning outcomes and the charter, while documenting anything outside scope rather than addressing it.

- Suggest relevant open educational resources and instructional methods appropriate to the revision.

- Maintain comprehensive documentation of design decisions to support partner review and approval.

- Incorporate partner and stakeholder feedback through agreed revision cycles.

- Facilitate SME working sessions to obtain the approvals required to complete deliverables.

- Coordinate with internal teams at defined handoff points to ensure deliverables are completed on schedule.

- Complete self-QA before each handoff and deliver complete, accurate work by each fixed milestone.

- Submit a status update with each milestone deliverable, and flag anything that's off track as soon as you identify it, so downstream stakeholders aren't caught by surprise.

- Work from the version of the design standards and charter in effect for your project. Both may be revised between projects as the program evolves.

What You Need to