Director of Learning Design & AI-Driven Curriculum

Pearson; United States; Remote; USD 160,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Pearson Virtual Schools is seeking a Director of Learning Design to lead the transformation of content developers into learning designers and to orchestrate AI-powered curriculum development. The role collaborates with product and curriculum leadership to ensure standards, accessibility, and rigor across licensed and proprietary courses.

Ideal candidate has 8+ years in curriculum leadership, hands-on experience with generative AI, and a track record of guiding managers through big

Qualifications

• 8+ years in curriculum, instructional design, or content development leadership, including experience in K-12 or virtual/online education
• Direct, hands‑on experience with generative AI tools for content creation, including prompt engineering, agent orchestration platforms, or AI-assisted production workflows
• Proven experience leading managers, not only individual contributors, through a significant operating-model change such as a reorganization or process transformation
• Working knowledge of K-12 content compliance, including state academic standards, accessibility requirements, and copyright and rights-clearance basics
• Sound enough judgment to say no to weak AI-generated output and defend that call to both the team and to leadership pushing for speed

Responsibilities

• Lead the development of high-quality curriculum that supports an effective, engaging virtual learning experience and the achievement of student outcomes
• Lead continuous improvement of curriculum and development processes informed by efficacy data, e.g. course performance data, assessment item analysis, and student outcome data
• Lead the transition of content developers and managers into learning designers and learning design managers, including role redefinition, competency frameworks, and training
• Assess the current team's readiness for the shift and make reskilling, redeployment, and external hiring calls in partnership with HR
• Set the tone and pace for a significant change across a large team, managing skepticism and skill gaps while retaining your strongest people
• Define the standard for effective human-agent collaboration in curriculum production: brief and prompt standards, review checkpoints, and escalation paths for agent errors
• Develop deep expertise of and hands-on experience with Pearson’s proprietary authoring toolset and ecosystem to identify tool enhancement or replacement and process improvements
• Own selection and evaluation of AI content-generation tools and platforms
• Build and maintain a quality assurance framework for AI-generated instructional content, covering pedagogical soundness, standards alignment, accessibility, bias, and originality risk
• Adapt review processes to AI-specific content risks such as fabricated citations and uncredited material
• Redesign team structure and reporting lines to reflect the shift from manual drafting to orchestration and review
• Establish a documented, repeatable agent-orchestration workflow with clear quality gates before content reaches editorial review
• Track throughput and cost-per-learning-unit through a rigorous measurement framework, without compromising instructional quality
• Partner with product, curriculum leadership, and compliance to ensure agent-orchestrated content meets state standards, accessibility requirements, and academic rigor
• Represent the team's transformation to senior leadership, reporting on productivity, quality, and risk metrics

Skills

Curriculum leadership

Instructional design

AI content generation

People management

Tools

AI tools & platforms

Job description

Pearson Virtual Schools is seeking a Director of Learning Design to lead the transformation of content developers into learning designers and to orchestrate AI-powered curriculum development. The role collaborates with product and curriculum leadership to ensure standards, accessibility, and rigor across licensed and proprietary courses.

Ideal candidate has 8+ years in curriculum leadership, hands-on experience with generative AI, and a track record of guiding managers through big