Instructional Designer (Contract)

Nectar; United States; Remote; USD 65,000 - 95,000; Part time

Job summary

Alchemy designs and builds online courses for universities and workforce education providers. You will work on a per-course basis with a faculty SME, taking a course from initial conversation to a finished build signed off by the client.

Engagements are contracted per course, with deliverables owned by the client. Regular collaboration, milestones, and review cycles are part of the process, with asynchronous work optional but not the default.

Qualifications

• Experience designing courses in higher education, K-12 or workforce learning.
• Fluency with LMS, particularly Canvas and Brightspace.
• Ability to collaborate with SMEs and lead relationships without dominating them.
• Clear, structured writing and adherence to style guides and templates.
• Degree in education, instructional design, instructional technology or related field, or equivalent experience.

Responsibilities

• Design course plan with SME: outcomes, assessment map, and course shape.
• Write the course guide/blueprint with narratives, activities, rubrics, and links.
• Review outcomes using Bloom’s taxonomy and ensure sequencing to match design.
• Design assessments, knowledge checks, and learning activities to measure outcomes.
• Draft a media plan with SME and coordinate with media producers and developers.
• Adhere to client templates, style guides, and design standards; manage dates and reviews.

Skills

Course design

LMS fluency

Client communication

Writing

Self-management

Education

Education or instructional design degree

Tools

Canvas

Brightspace

Articulate Storyline/Rise

Job description

ABOUT THE WORK

Alchemy designs and builds online courses for universities and workforce education providers. You would work on a per-course basis alongside a faculty subject matter expert, taking a course from the first conversation through to a finished build the client signs off on. Engagements are contracted per course, so you can take one course or several depending on your capacity. Most courses run eight to fourteen weeks of development. This is a collaborative role. You will work directly with your SME on a regular cadence, and there are project and client calls from time to time. If you are looking for work that can be done entirely asynchronously with no contact with faculty or the client, this is not that role.

WHAT YOU WILL DO

Design and development Partner with a faculty subject matter expert to develop the course plan: learning outcomes, assessment map, and the overall shape of the course.

Write the course guide or blueprint, the document that contains everything that will be built in the LMS. This includes instructional narrative, activity and assessment design, rubrics where used, and links to resources.

Review and write learning outcomes using Bloom's Taxonomy and related frameworks, making sure they are stated in performance terms, pitched to the audience, and sequenced to match the course design.

Design formative and summative assessments, knowledge checks and learning activities that actually measure the outcomes.

Draft a media plan with the SME, specifying what each asset is for, which outcome it addresses and roughly how long it should be, then work with media producers and interactive developers to get it made.

Work to the client's templates, style guide, terminology and design standards, which differ by client and which we will give you at kickoff.

Hold the standards: accessibility (WCAG 2.1 AA), the client's style guide, and the design standards for the project. Remediating accessibility issues in your own deliverables is part of the work.

Meetings and collaboration

Hold regular working sessions with your subject matter expert through the design phase. Plan on a standing weekly meeting. The course gets designed in those conversations, and a designer who only emails the SME will not get what the course needs. Attend additional project and client calls as necessary, or as your contract stipulates.

Project administration

Keep your own task status current in the client's project system (usually ClickUp). The project manager owns the schedule, but nobody can run a schedule off tasks that are not updated.

Run the review and approval process for your courses: submit on the dates in the plan, use the client's review request form, and route it to the named reviewers.

Review the built course in the LMS against your approved blueprint, log what needs fixing in one place, confirm the fixes landed, and sign off before it goes to the client.

Raise problems early. If a date is going to slip, an SME has gone quiet, or the scope has crept, say so while it can still be managed.

HOW THE ENGAGEMENT WORKS

Contracted per course under a work for hire agreement. Deliverables are owned by the client. Paid a fixed fee per course at defined milestones, on acceptance of each deliverable. This is not hourly work and there is no timesheet. A defined number of review cycles is included in the fee. The cycle count, the turnaround time we expect from you, and the revision window are stated in your contract.

Revisions requested inside that window are included. Work beyond it, or a change to the course scope after sign off, is handled as a contract amendment before it is started, not after.

Course assignments can change. Courses get added, removed, delayed or reassigned by the client. When that happens we amend the contract rather than absorbing it quietly.

You will work in our systems and the client's: Google Workspace, Slack, the project system, and the client's LMS. Some clients provide guest access with rules attached, and we will tell you what those are. We use AI tooling in our process, including our own platform.

You do not need to be an expert, but you do need to be comfortable working alongside it and following our rules about what client content can and cannot be put into external tools.

WHAT YOU WILL BRING

• Experience designing courses in higher education, K-12 or workforce learning and development, with at least one full course taken from outline to delivery.
• Fluency with learning management systems, Canvas and Brightspace in particular.
• The ability to work with a faculty subject matter expert who is an expert in their field but not in course design, and to lead that relationship without taking it over.
• Comfort in client-facing conversations, including ones where you have to say no or explain why something will not work.
• Clear, structured writing and the discipline to follow a style guide and a template rather than your own preferred format.
• The self-management to hit dates in a distributed team without being chased.
• A degree in education, instructional design, instructional technology or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Candor about what you have not done.
• We would much rather know at the application stage that you have never built an interactive or never worked in Brightspace than find out when it blocks a deliverable.

NICE TO HAVE

• Experience with Articulate Storyline or Rise, H5P, or other interactive development tools.
• Familiarity with Quality Matters or similar course design standards.
• Experience picking up a partially built course from another designer and finishing it.
• Experience using AI tools as part of a design workflow, with judgement about where they help and where they do not.
• Experience in a specific discipline area: business, criminal justice, education, psychology, health sciences or data analytics.