Manager, Instruction and Program Design

The Organization: Meritus College

Meritus College is a new kind of not-for-profit online college, built from the ground up to meet the needs of working adults and career-changers who’ve been overlooked by traditional higher education.

The problem is clear: only 33% of Pell grant recipients complete their degrees at two-year colleges within six years. College has become too rigid, too expensive, and too disconnected from both student realities and career outcomes. Meritus College is different. Our online, asynchronous programs and "workplace as laboratory" approach allow students to learn and apply new skills directly to their jobs, while receiving personalized support from dedicated coaches every step of the way. We focus on real-world skills and stackable credentials in high-demand fields, ensuring graduates are prepared for today's jobs and tomorrow's opportunities. Founded in 2025 with an inaugural Associate of Applied Science in Technology and Innovation degree, Meritus College is building a mainstream pathway to economic mobility—one designed not for the privileged few, but for the talented many who’ve too often been left behind.

Role Overview 

The primary mission of the Manager, Instruction and Program Design is to build the courses Meritus College teaches and to lead the team that supports learners through them. This is a player-coach role that combines two distinct responsibilities: hands-on instructional and program design and program/project management for the function’s people and work. You will design and build learning experiences yourself while leading the program designers, technology coordinators, coaches, and learner support staff who deliver and sustain them.

As Meritus College launches and builds in real time, you will own the course build process end to end, including partnering with subject matter experts and adjunct faculty to translate their expertise into competency-aligned, accessible, well-structured online courses, and holding that work to a consistent design standard. You will also be the connective point between how a course is designed and how learners actually experience it, using what coaches and support staff see in live delivery to improve the next build rather than waiting for a formal review cycle.

Just as importantly, you will serve as the program and project manager for the Instruction and Learner Support function translating priorities into plans, coordinating people and dependencies, tracking work, resolving blockers, and ensuring follow-through. This role requires someone comfortable moving between hands-on design work, managing a small multidisciplinary team, managing the function’s portfolio of work, and building the templates, standards, and workflows that do not yet exist. The Manager, Instruction and Program Design will report to the Director of Instruction and Learner Experience, and on an interim basis to the Managing Director of Curriculum & Instruction until that role is filled.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities of will include, but are not limited to, the following:

Team Leadership and Program Management (40%):

• Lead the full instruction and learner support workplan within the integrated College workplan. Maintaining projects, milestones, owners, timelines, and statuses.
• Lead the function's operating rhythm: as needed facilitate weeklies, key meetings, and internal reviews; set agendas; document decisions and next steps; ensure follow-through.
• Drive functional work forward: translate priorities into actionable plans, track commitments, follow up with owners, and unblock issues as they arise.
• Represent the program and learning design function in Functional Lead syncs within Meritus College, raising progress, asks, dependencies, decisions needed, and wins.

Support hiring and capacity planning recommendations as enrollment and course volume grow.Learning & Program Design (30%):

• Design and build college courses in the learning management system, including course structure, sequencing, activities, assessments, media, and learner-facing materials.
• Translate competencies and learning outcomes into instructional design that works for working adult learners in an online environment.
• Create and maintain course design standards, templates, and style guides so that courses are consistent, accessible, and buildable at pace as Meritus College grows.
• Design assessments, activities, and materials with an eye to how AI has changed skill demonstration in the field, integrating AI-enabled tools where they support learning and building in safeguards that protect academic integrity.
• Ensure every course meets accessibility requirements and that learner-facing materials are clear, usable, and aligned to what the catalog and syllabus promise.

Subject Matter Expert Partnership & Course Builds (20%):

• Serve as the primary partner to contract subject matter experts and adjunct faculty on new course builds, scoping the work, setting expectations, and guiding them through the design process.
• Manage course build timelines and dependencies so that courses are ready ahead of term start, and flag risks early when a build is at risk of slipping.
• Review SME-produced content for instructional quality, outcome alignment, and readiness, and give direct, usable feedback.

Quality & Continuous Improvement (10%):

• Use feedback from course delivery (e.g., learner performance, coach and support observations and LMS data) to identify where courses are not working and to drive revisions.
• Maintain course and design documentation to a standard that holds up under accreditation review, in partnership with the Compliance team.
• Proactively spot gaps in process, tooling, or ownership across design and learner support, and build practical solutions rather than waiting for direction.

Skills and Competencies

We recognize that some individuals from underrepresented backgrounds may hesitate to apply if they don’t meet 100% of the listed qualifications.  Please don’t let that discourage you from applying! We value the unique skills, experiences, and perspectives that each applicant brings, and we encourage you to apply if you believe your background demonstrates the required skills and competencies:

Must Haves for all roles at Meritus College: 

• Committed to Merit America’s mission to pave pathways to family-sustaining careers, break the poverty cycle, and create upward mobility for low-wage workers
• Demonstrated history of embodying our values, which inform our work and drive our organization's culture
• Shared sense of responsibility and ownership for our collective work in making a positive impact on the community we support, true to our value of Win & Lose Together
• Committed to continuous learning and growth in advancing inclusive excellence and closing gaps across lines of difference
• Passionate about fostering a workplace culture that embraces and values individual differences, aligned with our core value of inclusivity

Skills & Experience

• Bachelor's degree required; Master's degree in higher education, counseling, or a related field preferred.
• 5+ years in instructional or learning design, with a portfolio of courses you personally built. Experience designing for online, competency-based, or workforce-aligned programs serving working adults is strongly preferred.
• Experience managing people or leading a team, formally or as a project lead. You do not need to have carried a full management portfolio, but you should want to and be ready to.
• Experience partnering with subject matter experts, with the judgment to draw out what they know, push back on what will not work for learners, and keep a build moving without damaging the relationship.
• Strong technical fluency with learning management systems, authoring and media tools, AI-enabled instructional tools, and accessibility standards, plus the judgment to know when emerging technology strengthens a course and when it should give way to academic integrity. Comfortable learning new tools quickly.
•  Highly organized with strong project management instincts, able to keep multiple course builds and team workstreams moving against firm term deadlines.
• Comfortable in a start-up environment, creating templates, standards, and processes where none exist, and moving the work forward while building the system around it.
• Learner-centered judgment, with instincts for where working adults and non-traditional learners get stuck and the drive to fix the issues rather than documenting it.

Other Logistics 

• This position is full-time
• Location: Remote
• Salary: $113,000