What job titles do you use for your system administrators and support team?

[John_Lowe]

We are considering standardizing some of the job titles for members of our Learning Systems team. Right now, we have a Project Managers, Application Programmer Analysts, and Academic Consultants. Yet, all three positions are really the systems administrators for the LMS, web conferencing tools, WordPress environments, Qualtrics platform, and many other academic technologies. The current job titles seem to vary based on when each person entered our organization rather than vary in job duties. Academic Consultant seems to be our organizational default for many new positions lately, but that really isn’t accurate for these roles and sounds too much like a Student Services or academic support position title.

In your organization, what job titles do you use for the group of folks who provide system administration and user-support/training for your LMS and other academic systems?

[John_Lowe]

We are considering standardizing some of the job titles for members of our Learning Systems team. Right now, we have a Project Managers, Application Programmer Analysts, and Academic Consultants. Yet, all three positions are really the systems administrators for the LMS, web conferencing tools, WordPress environments, Qualtrics platform, and many other academic technologies. The current job titles seem to vary based on when each person entered our organization rather than vary in job duties. Academic Consultant seems to be our organizational default for many new positions lately, but that really isn’t accurate for these roles and sounds too much like a Student Services or academic support position title.

In your organization, what job titles do you use for the group of folks who provide system administration and user-support/training for your LMS and other academic systems?

[JessicaDeanSVC]

My job title is Instructional Design and eLearning Specialist. If the employee is not doing instructional design work, you could definitely truncate it down to just eLearning Specialist. The broad concept of eLearning gives me flexibility to be responsible for several different systems, while the specialist designation keeps me tied to our state's definition of a program specialist to avoid having an overwhelm of responsibilities.  

[DrNufer]

Since these days we are seeing more traditional and blended learning modalities that are actively using Canvas and online learning tools, "eLearning" may even be replaced with "Teaching and Learning".  A Teaching and Learning Specialist may be a broad title that supports all modalities.  At our institution, we've been making an effort the past several years to not silo our modalities since even the classroom populations leverage ed tech and online components of education.  Just a thought.

[DrNufer]

You may consider:

• Director of Online Services
• Online Learning Specialist
• Online Services Support Coordinator/Administrator
• Canvas [or LMS] Administrator

Ultimately, titles can be fairly easily altered and I typically focus more on the job description and tracking major responsibilities and time on task.

[nwilson7]

We have "Academic Technology Specialists" and "Instructional Designers" as our current titles.  These serve across modality so it does not matter if you are an online only instructor or a face-to-face or any combination.  These roles currently are also on the Academic Affairs side instead of the IT side to help show that they can speak more about pedagogy instead of just how something works.

-Nick

[chriscas]

Hi @John_Lowe,As working titles, we currently have:

• "Coordinator of Digital Education" for myself.  I'm the primary Canvas (and other related tool) administrator, the "tier 2/3" support person for said stools, and am also involved with strategic planning around digital education for our campus.
• "Digital Education Support Specialist" for our front-line tier-1 support personnel
• "Instructional Designer" for staff involves with instructional design and pedagogy (both in-person and online)
• "Video Production Assistant" for staff who assist faculty with recording and editing multimedia content for their courses.

Hope that helps a bit!

-Chris

[manishmaurya]

It's been a long time but, at my previous workplace, we had a similar issue. We eventually settled on "Learning Systems Administrators" for roles like yours. It helped clarify responsibilities and made hiring easier.

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