The University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC) is widely recognized as a pioneer in the online education community. For that reason, I was excited to learn about the UMGC search for a Vice President, Learning Product Development. To learn more about this role, I asked Angie Besendorfer, Chief Learner Experience and Success Officer, to answer our four standard Featured Gig questions.
Q1: What is the university’s mandate behind this role? How does it help align with and advance the university’s strategic priorities?
A: UMGC created the Vice President, Learning Product Development role at a moment of real alignment and momentum across the institution. The university is making clear, sustained commitments to learner-centered design, skills-forward education and the responsible integration of AI into teaching and learning. At the same time, UMGC is also investing in the people, frameworks and early innovations needed to support those commitments. This role exists to bring those elements together and move them forward with coherence, focus and scale.
The mandate for the role is both future-facing and grounded. It is about continuing the development of next-generation learning experiences by building on established instructional design standards, skills architecture and AI-supported learning design practices that are already in place. It is also about helping promising innovations mature into learning products that can be sustained, evaluated and improved over time. Central to the role is ensuring that learning experiences remain clearly aligned to skills, authentic assessment and workforce relevance, while maintaining academic quality and consistency in an AI-enabled environment. Just as important, the role extends UMGC’s existing approach to quality and continuous improvement, embedding data and learner feedback more systematically into how learning effectiveness is understood and enhanced.
This position offers the opportunity to help shape how UMGC and, more broadly, higher education evolves—by demonstrating what is possible when learning science, emerging technologies and skills-forward curriculum design are intentionally brought together at scale.
Q2: Where does the role sit within the university structure? How will the person in this role engage with other units and leaders across campus?
A: The Vice President, Learning Product Development sits within the newly created Learner Experience & Success division and reports to the Vice President, Learner Experience Design. This placement reflects UMGC’s belief that learning design, assessment and delivery are central to the learner experience and to the university’s mission—especially at a time when higher education is being asked to evolve more rapidly than ever before.
The role is intentionally designed to operate across organizational boundaries. The Vice President, Learning Product Development works closely with academic leaders and faculty to cocreate learning experiences grounded in disciplinary expertise and shared standards, while also engaging with experience design and learner success teams to ensure learning products align with the full student journey. They collaborate with learning resources, accessibility and support teams to ensure experiences are inclusive, usable and scalable, and with workforce-facing teams to maintain strong alignment between learning, skills and evolving labor market needs. The role also partners with technology, analytics and transformation teams to support AI-enabled learning design and to move validated innovation into production.
This is a role for a leader who is comfortable working at the intersection of pedagogy, technology and institutional strategy; and for someone who sees collaboration as essential to shaping the future of learning.
Q3: What would success look like in one year? Three years? Beyond?
A: In the first year, success looks like momentum paired with clarity. The Vice President develops a strong understanding of the learning product ecosystem already in place and builds trust-based relationships with faculty, deans and cross-functional partners. They establish a clear roadmap that builds on existing strengths while identifying high-impact opportunities for growth, and they deliver early wins that demonstrate how AI-enabled, skills-forward learning can meaningfully improve the learner experience and learning outcomes.
In three years, success looks like scale and institutional confidence. Learning products operate within a mature, well-understood lifecycle that supports continuous improvement from design through delivery. Assessment approaches that are authentic, skills-aligned and resilient in an AI-enabled environment are broadly adopted. Data and learner feedback are routinely used to inform design decisions and investment priorities, and there is visible improvement in the quality, consistency, and effectiveness of UMGC’s learning experiences as evidenced by learner referrals to their friends about their delightful experience.
Beyond that, success looks like leadership and influence. UMGC is recognized not just for experimenting with innovation, but for demonstrating how higher education can responsibly integrate AI, center learning on skills and outcomes, and deliver high-quality learning experiences at scale. Learning design and continuous improvement are embedded institutional capabilities, and the university is well-positioned to continue evolving as technologies, learner expectations and workforce needs change.
Q4: What kinds of future roles would someone who took this position be prepared for?
A: This role prepares leaders for senior executive positions at the forefront of higher education’s evolution. Someone who succeeds in this role gains deep experience in translating learning science into practice, integrating AI thoughtfully into curriculum and assessment, and leading institution-wide efforts to align learning with skills and outcomes.
As a result, this position provides strong preparation for future roles such as Chief Learning Officer or Chief Learner Experience Officer, senior academic innovation or digital learning leadership roles, and executive leadership positions focused on learning transformation within higher education. It also prepares leaders to contribute meaningfully to broader conversations shaping the future of the field—where questions of quality, scale, technology, and learner success increasingly converge.
The throughline is experience in helping define what effective, future-ready higher education can look like, and then building the structures and learning experiences to support it. Please get in touch if you are conducting a job search at the intersection of learning, technology and organizational change.
