Director, Digital Instructional Design

About NAF:

NAF is a national network of education, business, and community leaders who work together to ensure high school students are college, career, and future ready. NAF’s educational design ignites students’ passion for learning and gives businesses the opportunity to shape America’s future workforce by transforming the learning environment to include STEM infused industry-specific curricula and work-based learning experiences, including internships.

Since 1980, NAF has been partnering with high-need communities to improve outcomes for students by implementing NAF academies – small learning communities within existing high schools. NAF has grown from one NAF Academy of Finance in New York City to hundreds of academies across the country focusing on growing industries including: finance, hospitality & tourism, information technology, engineering, and health sciences. During the 2020-2021 school year, over 117,000 students attended 619 NAF academies across 37 states, plus DC, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. In 2020, NAF academies reported 99% of seniors graduated with 87% of graduates planning to go to college.

Summary: 

NAF is transforming the way high school students prepare to be college and career ready, and we’re looking for an experienced instructional designer to help us build digital curriculum solutions that deliver on our vision.

Students across the country are craving high-quality experiences that build new career skills and connect them to business professionals – and NAF is at the leading edge of this movement. Our new strategic plan calls for a deep investment in technology to bring work-based learning to all. The Director, Digital Instructional Design will be a founding member of a new digital team working to scale up career preparation solutions to students everywhere. 

In this role, you will lead the design, implementation, and continuous improvement of digital learning experiences for NAF high school students. In your first year, you will help design a brand-new internship preparation course, support the redesign of key lessons in our Finance curriculum, evaluate edtech offerings for career preparation, and develop a digital learning strategy to scale promising solutions across the NAF network. If you’re excited to both design the big picture strategy and create engaging digital curriculum to support it, then this position is for you!

Occasional travel is required regionally and nationally – normally approximately 10%-20%. Office location can be either in the New York City corporate office or from a home office. Due to COVID restrictions travel is temporarily suspended and all activities/position functions will be done remotely until further notice.

Responsibilities Include, but are not limited to:

Design and build interactive digital curricula that support high school students in becoming college and career ready: (50%)

• Create, review and redesign interactive digital lessons that engage students around essential career preparation topics, including evaluation of third-party curriculum
• Develop a clear process for gathering educator and industry input on NAF’s digital curriculum
• Partner with NAF’s DEI leaders to ensure our content is inclusive and culturally responsive

Lead the technology strategy for NAF’s online learning experience (30%)

•  Work closely with NAF’s technology and curriculum teams to overhaul NAF’s existing curriculum website and design the transition to a robust new content management system
• As NAF develops more digital lessons, determine the technology platform(s) approach for asynchronous and synchronous delivery through a Learning Management System (LMS)

Support the training, rollout, and distribution of digital curriculum (20%)

Through internal and external partnerships and collaboration: train educators and district staff on our new offerings; develop product rollout strategies; and distribute NAF’s content beyond our affiliated academies

Educational/Training Requirements:

Demonstrated experience is our priority, however it’s always nice to see candidates with degrees in educational technology, instructional design, or related disciplines

Experience:

• You have deep experience designing, creating, and rolling out digital learning strategies
• You can demonstrate clear examples of digital curriculum you have personally written
• You have developed content for one or more broadly adopted learning management systems (such as Canvas, Schoology, or Google Classroom)
• Bonus points if you have experience working in career development nonprofits, UI/UX roles, compiling and evaluating analytics, or small agile product teams

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities:

• You are a champion for effective online instruction and its value in learning, while remaining grounded in how classroom teachers both succeed and fail to leverage digital tools in their classrooms
• You know how to manage digital projects throughout the full life cycle (understanding users’ needs, designing a solution, and then developing, delivering, evaluating, and refining that solution)
• You are an effective project manager who can juggle many projects simultaneously
• You are a great communicator who enjoys designing content across multiple modalities
• You are a successful collaborator with educators, external vendors, and internal colleagues
• You are passionate about NAF’s mission and vision for creating a more equitable future

To Apply:

Interested applicants may apply at resumes@naf.org. Please include the position title, your first name and last name in the subject line, and submit your resume along with an answer to each of the following questions:

• Why did you decide to apply to NAF and to this position specifically?
• Tell us about a time when you used your instructional design strengths to create a bold new digital solution. What problem did you solve? How did you solve it? What was the outcome? (Feel free to share a link to what you produced if it’s publicly available.)
• How do you typically approach the design of a brand-new digital lesson? How do you incorporate a diversity, equity, and inclusion focus into your approach?