Product Designer

About Unity College:

For more than fifty years, Unity College has been preparing the next generation of environmental professionals and leaders to successfully face real-world challenges. With environmentally focused degrees, Unity College offers affordable and accessible degrees, certificates, and non-degree courses, through a variety of modalities including hybrid, in-person, hyflex, and online.

Our Mission:

Through the framework of sustainability science, Unity College provides a liberal arts education that emphasizes the environment and natural resources. Utilizing experiential and collaborative learning, our graduates emerge as responsible citizens, environmental stewards, and visionary leaders.

Position Overview:

As an ambassador for design the Product Designer (PD) tackles big challenges and leads the development of business-to-business non-credit products for Unity College Sustainable Ventures (SV). The primary responsibility of the PD is to develop innovative learning solutions through engaging pedagogy and various methodologies. With a solid foundation in instructional design principles, this position works with subject matter experts (SMEs) and business partners to develop non-credit courses, corporate learning, and micro-credentials. The PD provides guidance on aligning competencies, assessments, and objectives to optimize learning and provide continuous improvement. This position works closely with the Vice President of Sustainable Ventures in collaboration with stakeholders to oversee processes and resources, product documents, and other related materials and is based out of New Gloucester, Maine.

Key Responsibilities:

• Deliver strong, creative learning solutions to complex user problems.
• Liaise closely with the business-to-business partnership team to ensure efficient handoffs of build tasks, timelines, and benchmarks.
• Establish a culture of Agile product development, including mindset, processes, best practices, tools and nomenclature.
• Oversee all phases of the design process, aligning content to outcomes, while creating instructionally sound and engaging learning opportunities, and developing quality assessment tools.
• Provide pedagogical guidance to author original content, designing, and developing high quality, innovative, non-credit learning products, applying the appropriate learning and instructional theories.
• Development engaging and immersive, multi modal learning, while incorporating cutting edge digital media into the e-learning platform, including but not limited to live classroom, virtual live, on-demand, interactive multimedia, videos, VR/AR, AI based, quizzes, and gamification solutions, etc.
• Develop and lead trainings on instructor and client support materials, including tutorials, orientations, help sessions, and workshops, as needed.
• Provides product design services, consultation and assistance to help plan, coordinate, support, evaluate and improve learning products.
• Appraise learning content quality in terms of design, writing, and editing.
• Oversee design revisions and outcomes-based improvements of existing products.
• Remain current and maintain a thorough understanding of the latest industry technology tools and trends in EdTech and non-credit learning.
• Work with the VP of SV in collaboration with stakeholders to develop new services and test new products and learning technologies.
• Pro-actively communicate challenges, successes, and failures with leadership.
• Other duties as assigned.

Full job description provided at time of interview.



Required:

• Bachelor's Degree.
• Strong research, content analysis, and content preparation skills.
• Experience in leading and managing multiple, complex projects, and the ability to schedule, prioritize and meet varied deadlines across these projects.
• Ability to work under minimal supervision and manage multiple priorities both independently and within a team.
• Demonstrated excellent oral and written communication skills with strong interpersonal and presentation skills, while working with diverse content and populations.
• Proven ability to stay current with rapidly changing technologies.
• Ability and willingness to work with individuals from diverse political/socioeconomic backgrounds and a wide range of physical and academic abilities.
• Personal commitment to the environmental focus and mission of the college.
• Ability to function effectively within a matrix organizational structure, maintaining open lines of communication while being discreet, courteous and well poised.

Preferred:

• Masters degree in Instructional Design, Education, or equivalent field.
• One year of experience working in a full-time instructional design capacity, collaborating directly with curriculum building and course development.
• Experience developing non-traditional learning experiences, corporate learning, micro-credentials, and/or badging.
• Proven knowledge of instructional design strategies, along with the current techniques, tools, and procedures used in the design, development, and evaluation of technology-enhanced and online courses and programs.
• Experience with graphic design and AV elements appropriate for online instruction, especially using the Adobe Creative Cloud suite.
• Experience in online classroom teaching or workshop facilitation.
• Knowledge and understanding of Quality Matters, Online Learning Consortium and similar online learning rubrics.
• Familiarity with Universal Design and other accessibility principles to ensure course content is accessible to all learners.
• Proven ability to work effectively and communicate with subject matter experts, peers, users and media developers.
• Demonstrated competence working with CRM, LMS, and various media technologies
• Familiarity with HTML and CSS.

Location: Pineland Farms, New Gloucester, Maine

Just a half hour from Portland, Unity College Headquarters, Unity College Distance Education, The Technical School for Environmental Professions, and the School of Environmental Business & Sustainable Ventures are based at the Pineland Farms campus. The facilities are within easy access to one of the fastest-growing cities for startups in the country.

Benefits:

Unity College offers a comprehensive and competitive compensation and benefits package for its faculty and staff. Benefits for eligible employees include:

• Paid holidays
• Paid time off
• Medical
• Dental
• Short- and Long-term disability
• Life Insurance
• Flexible work benefit eligible
• Vision
• 403B