Job description

About King’s Online

King’s Online  is part of the new School for Professional and Continuing Education, it was formed in 2015 and develops a range of fully online courses and programmes. Following the appointment of a new Director, the team is embarking on an ambitious growth strategy and this is one of several new roles being advertised. You’ll be joining us at an exciting time as we seek to redefine online education and realise King’s strategic ambition of being the leading provider of online and blended learning by 2029. 
The role is primarily based at King’s Strand Campus though you may be required to travel to other campuses on occasion. As part of King’s trial of hybrid working, all team members can work remotely for part of the week if they wish.

About the role

King’s Online’s web development team works primarily on our learning platform, supporting a modular design for online programmes and courses in Moodle. The system builds on the existing bootstrap-based theme that is ingrained in the platform, and is composed of styles, components and templates. Content editors use these components and templates to build online courses and course content. 

Through mentoring, supporting and leading the development team you will enhance and maintain our modular design system according to UX hand-off and accessibility requirements, and write clear, concise documentation to support its use.

You will also support the team to provide technical and process support to King’s Online and the wider University as the design system is rolled out to others across the university. With both great technical and great communication skills, you will support our team to build the best possible e-learning product for our students.   

This post will be offered on an indefinite contract    

This is a full-time post

Key responsibilities

• Line manage and lead a small team of enthusiastic developers. Identifying and managing their performance, training and development needs, and helping scope their work.  
• Lead on the feature development and maintenance of our design system for the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), following the user research provided by our UX team  
• Support the development team on the production of clever and efficient solutions to technological problems, including exploring ideas for innovative project solutions leveraging tech effectively (eg APIs and querying, effective selection and use of frameworks)  
• Take ownership of the managing and updating coding quality and standards guidelines. And in turn mentoring junior members to ensure that they adhere to the quality standards.  
• Engage with open source development projects and represent King’s College London, as well as King’s Online in the communities around them  
• Promote a culture where accessibility and tech sustainability is embedded into all parts of the development process 
• Provide expert support, administration and guidance on the use of digital learning technologies, including identifying challenges, implementing effective solutions and providing appropriate educational and technical guidance  
• Facilitate effective communication between your team and the rest of King’s Online, such as UX designers, project managers and instructional designers 
• Represent King’s Online and OPEE in the wider university through delivering workshops, attending meetings, and participating in working groups 

The above list of responsibilities may not be exhaustive, and the post holder will be required to undertake such tasks and responsibilities as may reasonably be expected within the scope and grading of the post.  

Skills, knowledge, and experience

Essential criteria 

1. Experience of line management or leading, mentoring and supporting others in a professional context
2. Advanced understanding of Moodle LMS or similar virtual learning environment and other digital learning technologies
3. Expert knowledge of HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript
4. Experience of using front-end frameworks (e.g. Bootstrap, React) and pre-processors (e.g. Sass)
5. Experience of distributed version control systems (Git) as well as Webpack, Gulp or Grunt
6. Expertise with PHP
7. Ability to communicate technical information to non-technical stakeholders
8. Ability to work in an Agile environment and use supportive digital tools such as Slack and Azure Boards/Jira
9. Experience developing content authoring solutions, like design systems, CMSes or API-driven content delivery
10. Proven commitment to diversity and inclusion  

Desirable criteria 

1.       Understanding of development for cloud hosting in particular Azure

2.       Understanding of accessibility standards and testing

3.       Knowledge and experience of Agile scrum development methodologies