Senior Instructional Designer

McGraw Hill LLC. • UNAVAILABLE, UNAVAILABLE

2d • Remote

About The Position

McGraw Hill, a leading provider of digital and print educational resources, is seeking a Senior Instructional Designer for their K-12 division literacy programs, specifically focusing on 6-12 ELA. This role is crucial in designing high-quality digital learning experiences for millions of students and educators. The Senior Instructional Designer will work collaboratively with a cross-functional team, including content experts, product managers, UX designers, and creative technologists, to create engaging, standards-aligned, and accessible literacy products for middle and high school students. The position involves hands-on design work, process improvement, mentorship, and collaboration throughout the product development lifecycle. This is a remote, Project Status role with a fixed term through August 2027, open to applicants authorized to work in the United States.

Requirements

• 5-10 years experience in digital instructional design, curriculum development, or eLearning development.
• Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Instructional Design, Instructional Technology, Curriculum & Instruction, or a related field.
• Experience designing for digital platforms and creating learning experiences with authoring tools, learning management systems, and content management systems.
• Strong understanding of accessibility standards (e.g., WCAG) and universal design for learning (UDL).
• Proficiency with Agile workflows, sprint-based iteration, and collaborative team environments.
• Ability to lead cross-functional problem-solving with product, UX, and engineering teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with experience presenting to internal stakeholders and external partners.
• Strong ability to organize work across multiple priorities and make data-informed decisions.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and capable of influencing trade-off decisions across scope, quality, time, and resources.

Nice To Haves

• Deep understanding of curriculum development for grades 6–12, especially within the ELA discipline; classroom teaching experience is a strong plus.
• Experience working with or managing freelancers and vendors.
• Familiarity with K–12 educational publishing, edtech platforms, and/or literacy curriculum design.
• Engagement in professional learning networks or thought leadership communities.

Responsibilities

• Design digital curriculum using Understanding by Design (UbD), backward design, and design thinking principles.
• Develop prototypes, proof-of-concepts (POCs), and digital content tools in collaboration with subject matter experts (SMEs) and technical support.
• Contribute to and lead build rounds, manuscript reviews, and storyboarding.
• Write and maintain clear and user-centered product requirement documents.
• Apply accessibility best practices and proactively design accessible content and tools.
• Partner with content, UX, technology, engineering, and product teams to design learning experiences that are engaging and instructionally sound.
• Support Agile product development workflows through iterative feedback, sprint planning, and testing.
• Collaborate on tool enhancements and feature development, translating instructional needs into technical requirements.
• Contribute to cross-functional teams to ensure that product requirements, project schedules, and product goals are met and completed on time.
• Lead workflows across multiple components of the product, ensuring that timelines and quality benchmarks are met.
• Provide informal training and mentorship to Instructional Designers and Associate Instructional Designers, and new team members.
• Act as a point of contact for vendors, providing clear guidance, feedback, and decision-making support.
• Create and maintain documentation for digital workflows, best practices, and instructional guidelines.
• Identify, pilot, and scale novel approaches to digital learning that add measurable value for educators and learners.
• Support digital product tasks such as metadata tagging, concept mapping, and digital editing.
• Troubleshoot complex technical and instructional challenges through root cause analysis.
• Develop and refine best practices for using digital tools and for creating engaging content within technical constraints.

Benefits

• Medical and/or other benefits may be provided, depending on the position offered.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior