Director, Instruction and Learner Experience

About this role

The Organization: Meritus College
Meritus College is a new kind of not-for-profit online college, built from the ground up to meet the needs of working adults and career-changers who’ve been overlooked by traditional higher education.
The problem is clear: only 33% of Pell grant recipients complete their degrees at two-year colleges within six years. College has become too rigid, too expensive, and too disconnected from both student realities and career outcomes. Meritus College is different. Our online, asynchronous programs and "workplace as laboratory" approach allow students to learn and apply new skills directly to their jobs, while receiving personalized support from dedicated coaches every step of the way. We focus on real-world skills and stackable credentials in high-demand fields, ensuring graduates are prepared for today's jobs and tomorrow's opportunities. Founded in 2025 with an inaugural Associate of Applied Science in Technology and Innovation degree, Meritus College is building a mainstream pathway to economic mobility—one designed not for the privileged few, but for the talented many who’ve too often been left behind.
Role Overview
The primary mission of the Director, Instruction and Learner Experience is to own the learner-facing academic experience at Meritus College - what learners study, how well it is taught, and whether they are supported well enough to persist and complete. Most institutions split this work across a curriculum shop, a faculty office, and a student services division. Meritus deliberately does not, because curriculum design, instructional practice, and learner support succeed or fail together.
As Meritus College launches and builds in real time, you will lead the instruction, program design, and learner services teams while personally building what does not yet exist, writing the policy, redesigning the course, coaching the instructor, fixing the advising workflow, and documenting all of it to a standard that holds up under accreditation review. You will also serve as a core innovation partner to the Chief Academic Officer, bringing evidence from live delivery to sharpen the College’s competency-based, workforce-aligned model, and being candid when the current design is not working.
This role requires someone who moves fluidly between designing the model and doing the work, and who responds to unfinished systems by building rather than waiting for direction. The Director, Instruction and Learner Experience will report directly to Melinda Day, Chief Academic Officer, serve on the College’s core leadership team, and work cross-functionally across Meritus College teams.
Responsibilities
The responsibilities of the Director, Instruction and Learner Experience will include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Curriculum & Program Design (25%):

• Own the design, development, review, and revision of every academic program the College offers, including learning outcome architecture, course maps, assessment design, and materials selection.

• Direct the program design team’s roadmap and sequencing, and approve programs and courses before they go live.

• Ensure every program is aligned to labor market outcomes, accreditation standards, and the College’s educational philosophy and that the alignment is documented.

• Instruction & Teaching Quality (25%):

• Define what good teaching looks like at Meritus and hold the instructional team to it, including course facilitation expectations, feedback turnaround standards, engagement norms, and grading consistency.

• Conduct and oversee course observations and instructional review, and address teaching quality concerns directly, including through performance management when needed.

• Develop and evaluate, and develop instructional staff, and maintain the faculty credential files required for accreditation review.

• Manage instructor workload, course assignments, and staffing plans against enrollment projections.

• Learner Support & Learner Services (25%):

• Own the full learner support function: academic advising and coaching, tutoring, accessibility services and accommodations, library and learning resources, and early-alert and persistence outreach.

• Establish caseload standards, response-time expectations, and escalation paths, and ensure distance learners have access that is genuinely equivalent, not nominally equivalent.

• Own first-level resolution of learner academic complaints, grade appeals, and academic progress disputes.

• Assessment, Policy & Accreditation Readiness (10%):

• Design and run the assessment system, including course- and program-level outcome assessment, the annual program review cycle, and the documented loop from evidence to curricular change.

• Own the academic metrics the College watches, persistence, course completion, competency attainment, time to completion, satisfactory academic progress, and learner satisfaction, and bring analysis, not just dashboards, to leadership.

• Draft, steward, and maintain academic policy, including grading, satisfactory academic progress, academic integrity in an AI-enabled learning environment, academic engagement, transfer and prior learning credit, grade appeals, and instructor evaluation..

• Author the academic sections of the accreditation self-study and ensure the catalog, syllabi, and learner-facing materials say the same thing the policies say.

• Team Leadership & Strategic Partnership (15%):

• Lead, manage, and grow the instruction, program design, and learner services teams, setting goals and performance expectations and making hiring and role-design recommendations.

• Build a team that can absorb enrollment growth without a proportional increase in headcount, through better systems, clearer standards, and documented processes.

• Serve as a trusted thought partner to the Chief Academic Officer, proposing what comes next, like new programs, modalities, credential structures, and support models, with cost, risk, and…