Director of Online Learning Job Description

A Director of Online Learning leads the office that keeps a college's online and hybrid courses running and up to standard. The office owns the learning management system (Canvas, D2L Brightspace, Blackboard or Moodle), the instructional designers who build courses with faculty, and the review process that decides whether a course is ready to teach. Some colleges call the post Director of Online Education or Director of Online Learning Services; the work underneath those names is the same.

Where the job sits

The reporting line varies by campus. At Imperial Valley College in California, the Director of Online Learning Services works under the vice president of academic services. At Modesto Junior College in the Yosemite Community College District, the Director of Online Education receives general administrative direction from the dean of instruction and gives direction to instructional designers. Either way, the director does not run an academic department. The job serves every division that schedules an online section, which means negotiating with deans and faculty senates rather than commanding them.

The core work

Course quality is the center of the role. The director adopts a rubric, trains faculty reviewers, schedules reviews and tracks which courses pass. Imperial's classification lists course quality processes, accessibility, faculty training and learning management system support among the director's responsibilities, alongside regular and substantive interaction (RSI) between instructors and students.

Faculty development is the second pillar. Directors run workshops and short courses on designing modules, writing measurable outcomes, building accessible documents, using the LMS gradebook and keeping discussion active in asynchronous sections. Directors can pair training with one-on-one design help, so the instructor leaves with a working course shell and not just a certificate.

The third pillar is technology and vendors. The director manages the LMS contract and its integrations with the student information system, lecture capture (Panopto or Kaltura), proctoring, plagiarism detection and courseware. The office also maintains the course template that new online sections start from, so navigation, syllabus placement and gradebook setup stay consistent from one department to the next. When a tool fails during finals week, the call comes here.

Compliance and reporting

Online programs carry their own paperwork. Imperial's director is the primary liaison with the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office on online and distance education reporting requirements, and the Yosemite classification asks its director to align online offerings with accreditation standards and state and federal requirements. The same Yosemite job coordinates open educational resources and zero textbook cost initiatives. In practice, the director is the person who can answer an accreditor's question about how online students are served, with evidence in hand.

Education

A master's degree is the usual entry point. BLS lists a master's degree as the typical entry-level education for postsecondary education administrators, the closest BLS occupation to this job. Relevant fields include educational technology, instructional design, curriculum and instruction, adult learning and higher education administration. A doctorate (Ed.D. or Ph.D.) can help at universities where the director sits on academic councils or teaches graduate courses.

Classification specs show what employers write down. Imperial Valley College's Director of Online Learning Services requires a master's degree from a regionally accredited institution in a related discipline and at least two years of formal training or experience related to distance education or online learning. Treat that as one college's floor, not a national rule.

Experience

As a rough guide, directors arrive with several years as an instructional designer, LMS administrator or online faculty member, plus a stretch supervising staff. The strongest candidates can point to a quality program they built, a migration from one LMS to another, or an accessibility remediation project they finished. Supervisory experience matters because the job means hiring designers, setting their workloads and evaluating them.

Credentials worth pursuing

No license is required. Useful credentials include:

• QM-Certified Peer Reviewer (Quality Matters). Earned after the Applying the QM Rubric workshop and the Higher Ed Peer Reviewer Course, followed by an approved role application.
• Higher Ed Teaching Online Certificate (Quality Matters). Earned by completing seven workshops on online teaching competencies, useful for directors who train faculty.
• Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies, CPACC (International Association of Accessibility Professionals). A foundational accessibility credential for directors who own remediation work.

Skills that separate candidates

• LMS administration at the back end: roles and permissions, course templates, SIS integrations, LTI tools and data exports.
• Accessibility practice: WCAG success criteria, captioning workflows, accessible PDFs and slides, and remediation planning for legacy courses.
• Course design methods: backward design, outcome alignment, rubric-based review and authoring tools such as Articulate Rise or H5P.
• Data: reading course success, withdrawal and completion reports by modality, and turning them into a plan the deans will accept.
• Governance: knowing how a curriculum change moves through faculty committees, and how to work with a faculty union where one exists.
• Contract management: reading a vendor agreement for data privacy, accessibility warranties and termination terms.

The federal projection

BLS projects employment of postsecondary education administrators to grow 2 percent from 2025 to 2035, slower than the average for all occupations. Even with limited growth, the agency expects about 14,500 openings a year on average across the decade, most of them from replacing people who move to other occupations or retire. Those numbers cover the whole occupation, from admissions offices to provosts, and BLS does not count directors of online learning separately. Read them as the backdrop for campus administration, not a forecast for this title.

Online enrollment is the base of the job

Federal enrollment data show how much of college now runs through the director's office. NCES Digest table 311.15, prepared in March 2026 from IPEDS data, counts 19,659,633 students at degree-granting institutions in fall 2024. Of those, 10,761,754, or 54.7 percent, took at least one distance education course, and 26.5 percent took distance courses exclusively. Among postbaccalaureate students, 40.5 percent studied exclusively at a distance. Each of those enrollments runs through course shells that an online learning office supports, reviews and keeps accessible.

Accessibility deadlines moved

Public colleges are covered by the Justice Department's ADA Title II web rule, which adopted WCAG 2.1 Level AA as its technical standard. An interim final rule effective April 20, 2026 extended the compliance dates, which still stand as of November 2026: April 26, 2027 for state and local government entities with a total population of 50,000 or more, and April 26, 2028 for entities with a total population under 50,000 and for special district governments. The extra time shifts the work rather than removing it. For a director at a public institution, those dates set the schedule for remediating legacy course content, clearing captioning backlogs and reviewing vendor accessibility.

What online leaders are discussing

The research team behind the CHLOE project (Quality Matters, EDUCAUSE and Encoura Eduventures Research) convened six focus groups with 30 online learning leaders and practitioners in spring 2026. The resulting four-report series covers quality, online program strategy, AI and differences across institutional sectors, and Quality Matters says CHLOE 11, the next national survey of online leaders, is coming in 2027. For a director, the series is a peer benchmark on how other campuses connect strategy, faculty and instructional design support, accessibility, student support and data.

Partnerships face more scrutiny

UPCEA says third-party partnerships for online programs have faced scrutiny from lawmakers and student-consumer advocacy organizations in recent years. In November 2024 the Education Department rescinded its 2023 Dear Colleague Letter GEN-23-03, which had expanded the definition of third-party servicers, and UPCEA's 2026 guidance on third-party partnerships says regulatory uncertainty persists. Directors who manage these contracts need to know which functions a partner performs and how each is classified.

Where the career goes

From the director level, paths lead to associate or assistant vice provost roles that combine online learning with academic technology, to dean of online or continuing education posts, or to vendor-side jobs in learning platforms and course design services. Each of those roles builds on the same record: online course quality tied to enrollment and student success results a provost can present to the board.

Dear Members of the Search Committee,

Please consider me for the Director of Online Learning role at Lakeshore Community College. For the past four years I have served as associate director of the Center for Online Teaching at Harbor State University, where I supervise four instructional designers and an LMS administrator and support roughly 600 online and hybrid sections each term.

When I arrived, Harbor State had no shared standard for online course design. I led a working group of faculty and designers that adopted a review rubric, trained a first cohort of faculty peer reviewers, and set up a review calendar that departments could plan around. Two years later, every new fully online course goes through review before its first term, and faculty now request reviews of existing courses on their own.

Accessibility has been the hardest and most rewarding part of the job. I built an inventory of our older course materials, ranked them by enrollment and risk, and worked with disability services and our captioning vendor on a remediation schedule. I also wrote the accessible-document training that is now required for new online instructors.

Last year I led our move from Blackboard to Canvas. I kept the faculty senate informed at every stage, ran migration clinics in each college, and held weekly office hours through the first semester. We finished on schedule, and the help-desk queue returned to normal within a month.

Lakeshore's plan to expand evening and online programs for working adults is the kind of work I want to lead. I would bring a tested review process, a practical approach to accessibility, and a habit of building trust with faculty before asking them to change. I would welcome the chance to talk with you.

Sincerely, Jordan Ellis