Senior Manager, Design & Development

If you’re passionate about building a better future for individuals, communities, and our country—and you’re committed to working hard to play your part in building that future—consider WGU as the next step in your career.

Driven by a mission to expand access to higher education through online, competency-based degree programs, WGU is also committed to being a great place to work for a diverse workforce of student-focused professionals. The university has pioneered a new way to learn in the 21st century, one that has received praise from academic, industry, government, and media leaders. Whatever your role, working for WGU gives you a part to play in helping students graduate, creating a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

The salary range for this position takes into account the wide range of factors that are considered in making compensation decisions including but not limited to skill sets; experience and training; licensure and certifications; and other business and organizational needs.

At WGU, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their position, and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case. A reasonable estimate of the current range is:
 

Grade: Management_Executive 608

Pay Range: $101,000.00 - $181,800.00

Job Description

Summary

The Senior Manager, Design & Development, manages the pipeline for development and production of competency-based learning experiences for academic and professional programs and the teams of assessment developers, instructional designers and instructional technologists who create them. The successful candidate will establish and supervise teams and vendors who will develop and produce industry-driven, activity-driven, social-by-design modules, courses, and specializations that meet the provided design specifications. The Senior Manager is responsible for ensuring that the production of course and activity content results in highly engaging, goal-oriented, beautiful learning objects and fair, valid and reliable assessments, which are true to the integrity of the targeted design. The Senior Manager will be responsible for resourcing and delivering assessment and curriculum solutions and experiences respectful of timelines and budgets for new and redeveloped college programming and attending to opportunities to improve student success through continuous improvement efforts.

Essential Functions and Responsibilities

• Ensure the alignment and quality of new and redeveloped curriculum and assessment products against program design and charter requirements
• Source, develop, and manage assessment development and instructional design talent
• Collaborate with program owners, development team supervisor, and project managers to resource and deliver new, redeveloped, and enhanced programs and courses
• Ensure adequate and timely maintenance of courses
• Participate in the definition of college curriculum and assessment approaches
• Assign and manage teams or select and manage vendors to develop products to realize college roadmap while maximizing value to stakeholders
• Collaboratively define, set up, manage, and document efficient and scalable development and production policies, methodologies, procedures, and development standards. Collaborate with colleagues to ensure consistency of operations across projects and colleges and continuously improve departmental efficiency
• Hire project teams and vendors, maintain relationships, manage risk, and ensure successful outcomes. Interact daily with team members and vendors to mentor, provide feedback, and build teamwork
• Responsibly manage budgets for development and production for multiple, multi-faceted, fast-paced projects with inflexible deadlines, effectively providing high-quality production values while achieving sustainability and educational affordability through scale
• Manage development and production vendors and teams to ensure timely delivery of highly engaging, goal-oriented, beautiful learning objects, which may include videos, animations, interactives, project samples, cases, assessments and social experiences
• Monitor project status and progress; identify and remove barriers to keep production on schedule and resolve production delays
• Lead or supervise the upstream review team process to ensure accuracy and quality in content and curriculum material
• Participate in the design of new instructional techniques and innovations
• Other duties as assigned
• To fulfill these responsibilities, the senior manager leads a team of high-performance assessment and curriculum design and development professionals who:
  • Oversee adh