eLearning Developer

Learning in a bricks-and-mortar classroom typically comes down to just one person — the Teacher — who’s responsible for delivering face-to-face instruction to his or her students. Online learning is rarely so streamlined. A team endeavor, it requires not only the Teacher, but also a cadre of educational and technical experts who can create the lessons and build the technology for dispatching them.

As an eLearning Developer, you’re the Project Manager in charge of organizing that team of experts. Coordinating all the disparate pieces of an elearning program, you’re at once an Educator and a computer geek, capable of creating educational content as well as the virtual environments in which to teach it.

Usually employed by a software company, eLearning Developers collaborate with Teachers in order to coordinate the production of eLearning platforms, modules, and courses that are delivered either online — via a learning content management system — or offline, via off-the-shelf computer software. Typically, that begins with brainstorming sessions during which you decide what you’re going to teach and how you’re going to teach it, including what content will be presented and in what formats (for example, video, audio, text, etc.). From there, development moves from planning into production, at which point you supervise and contribute to software programming, coding, testing, and troubleshooting, all the while respecting industry standards that have been established for both content and technology.

Part Manager, part practitioner, an eLearning Developer is kind of like a Construction Foreman: Essentially, you oversee the construction of virtual classrooms, byte by byte instead of brick by brick.