Educational Technology Designer at James Cook University: What the Role Asks and Who Should Apply

A Researcher Development Role, Not Student Course Design

James Cook University's Educational Technology Designer vacancy is not the kind of learning design job most people picture. The role sits inside the Graduate Research School, the unit that manages Higher Degree by Research (HDR) candidates — PhD and research masters students — from enrolment through to examination. The audience is not an undergraduate cohort in a subject site. It's a few hundred research students at different stages of candidature, plus the supervisors and research support staff around them, split across Townsville, Cairns and remote locations.

The posting is a two-year fixed-term contract, full-time at 36.25 hours a week, based at the Bebegu Yumba campus in Douglas, Townsville. The salary is Higher Education Worker Level 7 (HEWL 7), with a base between $99,878.44 and $110,446.52 per annum, plus up to 17 per cent superannuation through UniSuper. Applications close on 1 November 2026, and the nominated contact for enquiries is Gabby Ryan at gabby.ryan@jcu.edu.au.

The designer's brief is to turn priority face-to-face professional development into accessible online learning, maintain the modules once they exist, and apply emerging technologies — including generative AI — in a responsible, pedagogically sound way. That last part matters because HDR candidates rarely have the luxury of a Thursday 10 a.m. workshop. Some are on campus, others are in Cairns or Singapore or collecting data on a reef. The work has to hold up in short chunks, on a phone, after an assay fails.

What the Work Actually Looks Like Day to Day

Think of the role as production with a design brain attached. The concrete tooling is a mix of learning management system work, authoring tools and multimedia production. JCU runs LearnJCU, its Blackboard environment, where subject sites and Ultra courses live side by side. Content built for LearnJCU has to pass Anthology Ally checks against WCAG 2.1 accessibility standards, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that define how screen readers, captions and alternative formats work.

On a typical week, you'll break a three-hour research integrity lecture into shorter modules, rebuild slides so a screen reader can follow every table, cut a recording into captioned segments, and chase the academic whose one quick video has been promised for five weeks. You'll read learner analytics to see where people drop off, then rework the module that loses everyone at minute eleven. You'll sit with subject matter experts across Colleges and translate what they know into something clear and structured. You'll also field the quiet administrative parts: versioning, naming conventions, and the occasional fix because a PDF went up unscanned for the fourth time.

The State of Learning Design in Australian Universities

Australian learning design has grown into a specialised and reasonably stable occupation over the past several years. In the 2025 Learning Design Futures survey of 268 practitioners, run by researchers from three Australian universities in partnership with the Australian Institute of Training and Development, 88 per cent of respondents worked in Australia and more than half held a master's degree or doctorate. Nearly 40 per cent led a team or had staff reporting to them. That is the base rate: an experienced, highly educated workforce. The two friction points are structural rather than intellectual. About 70.6 per cent of respondents were unsure whether a professional code of conduct guided their practice, or said none did, and 57 per cent reported unclear career progression pathways. That's why a fixed-term HEWL 7 role reads as both a genuine opportunity and a familiar problem.

JCU's Graduate Research School has been building out this area — it recently listed a Research Training and Researcher Development Advisor at HEWL 8 in the same unit — and the pattern matches an observation AcademicJobs has made before: Australian universities keep hiring instructional and educational designers because students enrol where the course works on a phone after a night shift, not because the title is fashionable.

A designer I'll call Priya took a role much like this at another research university about three years ago. Her first six months were not spent learning the LMS. They were spent calming two professors who had promised to record modules and then gone quiet, and rebuilding a literature-review workshop whose original deck was thirty-two slides with no descriptive text. By month nine, the busiest face-to-face sessions had moved on-demand and one module had more completions than the old in-person workshop ever had registrations. Her takeaway applies squarely here: subject matter expertise is rarely the obstacle; restrained attention from busy researchers and retrofitting accessibility onto legacy content are the obstacles.

At JCU, the accessibility retrofit has a defined tool and a defined standard. Anthology Ally sits inside LearnJCU, assigns each file a score from low to perfect against WCAG 2.1, and tells the designer which fix matters most. The regulatory layer adds further pressure. TEQSA published updated assessment-reform guidance in September 2025 that pushes institutions toward multiple, contextualised approaches in a time of generative AI. That guidance lands in this role too: whoever designs the modules now decides where AI appears in learning content and how the institution shows that learning actually happened.

What This Means for Your Lab

The fix here isn't a policy document. It's a production habit. For a design team, or for the person who lands this role, the practical moves are these:

• Build one template per module type — orientation, confirmation, grant writing — and reuse it so new content doesn't start from zero.
• Enforce one accessibility check at the upload stage rather than retrofitting twenty legacy files at the end.
• Store originals, transcripts and captions in a shared folder with a README, so when a fixed-term contract ends the work doesn't leave with it.
• Version every module with a date, owner and subject matter expert contact, because academics re-record after every conference.
• Over-communicate deadlines to subject matter experts in writing. The polite follow-up email is part of the job.

The base rate from the profession survey is worth repeating to any hiring manager reading this: more than half your candidate pool holds a master's or doctorate, yet 57 per cent can't see a progression path. If you want the fixed-term hire to turn into a long-term capability, spell out what the next step is.

The Townsville Arithmetic: Salary, Housing, and the Commute

Townsville changes the financial equation. The city's median house price was around $427,500 in mid-2024, against roughly $920,000 in Brisbane and well over $1.4 million in Sydney, according to regional development figures. A HEWL 7 package in the upper half of its range, plus 17 per cent super, stretches much further in Douglas than an equivalent post in a southern capital. The population sits around 200,000, the commuting norm is under 20 minutes, and the Good Universities Guide 2026 ranks JCU first in Queensland for full-time employment of undergraduates and postgraduates.

The trade-offs are real and worth naming. The dry season, May to October, is the payoff; the wet season, November to April, brings humidity, storms, and the occasional stinger warning around unprotected beaches. Professionally, the campus more than holds its own. JCU runs the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine and has research strength in marine science, tropical health, ecology and geoscience, with ready access to the Great Barrier Reef and the Australian Institute of Marine Science. That research context shapes the professional development content a designer will work with: data management, research integrity, writing for publication, and the candidature milestones.

How to Apply Without Writing a Vague Application

The application route is the JCU careers page. You'll complete a form, upload a current resume, and upload a cover letter that addresses the key requirements with concrete examples. The university says all applicants will be contacted with an outcome once recruitment is finalised, which is unusual and worth noting. You can also review the summarised posting on AcademicJobs before you submit.

Shortlisting panels in this field search for system names. Say LearnJCU, Blackboard Ultra, H5P, Panopto, Ally, WCAG 2.1, Articulate, and say what you did with them.

• Name the LMS and authoring tools you've used, and attach one sample module or storyboard rather than a paragraph of adjectives.
• Address generative AI directly: show a design where AI helped draft a case study or quiz stem, and explain how you vetted the output for accuracy, bias and privacy.
• Pick the three selection criteria that actually decide the interview and answer those with evidence, not declarations.
• If you've worked with academic staff or researchers, say how many and how you moved a project from we should record that to a published module.

Start with a small, concrete step. Open a module you built in the past six months and run it through an accessibility checker. If the result is a list of alt-text and contrast fixes, that list is your cover letter. Then submit before 1 November.