Director, Instructional Design

Build the Future

At McGraw Hill, we are dedicated to delivering digital learning experiences that transform education for learners and educators. Our focus is on creating seamless, impactful products that truly benefit our users while supporting growth and collaboration across teams. We foster a culture that values innovation, teamwork, and a balance between career growth and personal well-being.

How can you make an impact?

McGraw Hill, a leader in digital and print educational solutions, is seeking a Director, Instructional Design to help shape the future of education by creating best-in-class digital teaching and learning experiences. The Director is responsible for collaborating across our academic design, product management, creative design, and technology teams to develop and deliver effective and engaging teaching and learning experiences.

As a leader in the organization, you help catalyze transformation of our instructional design practice by connecting our ecosystem of instructional models, content, digital tools, and educator supports that empower teachers and engage students. Reporting to the Senior Director of Learning Architecture & Instructional Design, you will oversee a functional team of Instructional Designers and collaborate within our product system where cross-functional teams optimize digital content in every experience we bring to market, or our experience system where cross-functional teams deliver supports and enablers to our product and platform systems. You will operate in an environment that requires excellent problem[1]solving skills and exceptional collaboration, facilitation, and communication skills.

This position can work remotely within the United States.

What You'll do:

• Digital Content Delivery: You have a strong point-of-view on when and how digital experiences are best used in instruction. You drive learning outcomes and follow research-based best practices, partnering closely with Content Academic Design and Learning Architecture. You and your team are responsible for developing and delivering flexible, accessible, engaging, effective, and modular digital content in our products. *

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Content Academic Design, Product, Marketing, UX, and Engineering teams to define the most important problems to solve for our users and then co-create learning experiences that are grounded in research and responsive to customer feedback. Employ quality assurance testing, troubleshooting, and continuous improvement processes and practices.

• Find & Hire the Right People: Define and assemble the right roles and people to form, not just a department, but a team that is relentless in creating learning experiences for students that drive outcomes. Mentor, foster, and support intelligent innovation and risk taking that aligns with overall product strategy and business objectives.

• Change Champion: Serve as a change agent who motivates, guides, and empowers their teams and cross-functional partners to adopt new processes, systems, and behaviors. Lead and support change initiatives by clearly communicating vision, benefits, and expectations. Collaborate with leadership to identify resistance, address concerns, and build a culture of continuous improvement and adaptability.

• Data-Driven Improvement: Develop and apply metrics to evaluate the effectiveness, quality, and efficiency of the content in our learning experiences-driving iterative improvements across the ecosystem.

What you will bring to the role:

• Instructional Design Expertise: You can match instructional goals with the best digital learning activities and know how to design and build supporting multimedia. You conduct instructional research analyses, and apply tested instructional design theories, practices, and methods as you envision and deliver new digital experiences. You can quickly deliver a low-fidelity concept, mockup, or prototype to facilitate discussion and get feedback. You also understand trade-offs are necessary to bring an experience to life, both for end users and our internal delivery teams.

• Production & Tooling Expertise: You are a master craftsperson when it comes to the tools and workflows needed to bring a learning experience to life in digital. As new features and capabilities in our platform emerge, new creation tools also emerge, and you quickly learn and adapt your ways of working. You lead strategic thinking about effective metadata, tagging, and build strategies as necessary, and can guide both internal teams and vendors to scale production.

• Pedagogical Understanding: Refined knowledge of pedagogical approaches specific to your focus area, and situations where those approaches are best employed. You know how to translate pedagogical intent into efficacious learning experiences and use models, like SAMR, to help guide your decisions.

• Content Innovation & AI Integration: Ability to champion new ideas and emerging technologies-especially AI-to evolve how content is created, adapted, optimized, and personalized at scale.

• Leadership Qualities: You exhibit exceptional communication and leadership skills. You build broad support with peers and other cross-functional leaders, moving them to commitment and action. You have a strong presence and work with your team to ensure effective collaboration with others and timely delivery of responsibilities.

• Business and Financial Acumen: You understand how business value is created through Instructional design and help develop compelling business cases to fund new development. Experience developing RFPs and vendor contracts that align with business objectives.

Qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree required; advanced degree (Master's or Doctorate) in education, instructional design, or related field preferred.
• 7+ years in product development, with 5+ years in people leadership roles.
• Experience managing vendors, independent contractors, and other third-party relationships
• Ed tech experience preferred
• Knowledge of Content Management Systems, authoring, and learning management tools.
• Proven ability to inspire, influence and negotiate at all levels of an organization
• Familiarity with agile development environments.

Why work for us?

The work you do at McGraw Hill will be work that matters. We are collectively designing content that will build the future of education. Play your part and experience a sense of fulfilment that will inspire you to even greater heights.

The pay range for this position is between $90,000-$140,000 annually, however, base pay offered may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and location. Click here to learn more about our benefit offerings.

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