The emergency remote teaching experiment of 2020 is over. What institutions are building now is something more deliberate — and significantly more demanding. Hybrid and online learning infrastructure, designed to deliver consistently excellent educational experiences across modalities, requires a team sitting at the intersection of IT and academics. Most universities do not have it.
They have a help desk that handles faculty AV tickets and a small LMS administration team managing Canvas or Blackboard configurations. What they need is a fully staffed academic technology organization capable of LMS migration, accessibility compliance, instructional design support, and hybrid classroom technology management. This post maps the roles and the academic technology staffing approach that works.
Blackboard's market share at U.S. universities has declined significantly as institutions migrate to Canvas, Brightspace (D2L), and Moodle. These migrations are not just system swaps — they involve migrating thousands of course shells built by faculty over years, retraining an entire institution, renegotiating vendor contracts, and maintaining dual-platform operations during the transition.
Simultaneously, hybrid learning infrastructure — classrooms equipped for simultaneous in-person and remote participation, studio recording facilities for asynchronous content production, and accessibility tools for students with disabilities — requires ongoing technical staffing that most institutions have not scaled to meet.
The result: faculty frustration with LMS performance and classroom technology is at a high, while the academic technology teams responsible for it are chronically understaffed. The impact shows up in faculty satisfaction surveys, student course evaluations, and — for online programs — accreditation reviews.
The operational leader of the academic technology function. Manages the LMS administration team, coordinates with the instructional design group, serves as the primary liaison between IT and academic affairs, and owns the academic technology roadmap. This person translates faculty needs into technical requirements and technical constraints into language faculty can work with.
The Academic Technology Manager needs both IT credibility and genuine comfort in academic culture — attending faculty meetings, understanding the tenure and promotion process, and building trust with department chairs who view IT as a service provider rather than a partner. This dual-culture profile is difficult to find and is the most common search challenge in academic technology staffing.
The technical owner of the learning management system — configuration, integrations, user provisioning, analytics, and platform migration. During an active LMS migration (Blackboard to Canvas, for example), this is a 12 to 24 month intensive project engagement before settling into steady-state administration.
LMS Administrators with migration experience — who have managed a Canvas or Brightspace implementation from scoping to go-live — are in high demand. Contract staffing for the migration phase, followed by permanent placement for ongoing administration, is the model that manages cost while securing the institutional knowledge the role accumulates.
Works directly with faculty to design and implement technology-enhanced learning experiences. Supports online course development, builds accessible multimedia content, and trains faculty on LMS features and academic technology tools. This role sits closest to the faculty — and requires someone who can simultaneously understand adult learning theory and administer an Echo360 lecture capture system.
Instructional Technologists are among the most frequently posted and most difficult to fill roles in higher education academic technology. The combination of technical competency and pedagogical knowledge in a single candidate is genuinely rare. Part of the challenge is salary — universities typically post these roles at $55,000 to $70,000, while the private sector is offering $90,000 for instructional designers with comparable skills.
Produces the video, interactive, and graphic content that populates online and hybrid courses. Operates the studio recording environment, edits lecture capture content, develops interactive H5P or Rise modules, and supports accessibility conversion of legacy course materials. As asynchronous content production has scaled, institutions that under-invested in Multimedia Developer capacity are now running backlogs that stretch months.
ADA compliance in digital learning materials is an accreditation and legal obligation that many institutions are not meeting. Course videos require captions. PDFs must be structured for screen readers. Interactive content must meet WCAG 2.1 standards. The Digital Accessibility Specialist audits existing content, establishes standards for new content production, trains faculty, and remediates the highest-priority legacy materials.
This role is increasingly required rather than optional — the Department of Education and accreditation bodies are scrutinizing digital accessibility more rigorously. For institutions with substantial online program enrollment, an accessibility failure is a regulatory risk. IT staffing in the Boston area for digital accessibility roles has grown significantly as a result.
Academic technology functions need a core of permanent staff — the Manager, at minimum one LMS Administrator for ongoing operations, and an Instructional Technologist per significant scale of online programming. Contract augmentation makes sense for LMS migration projects, accessibility remediation initiatives, and multimedia production surge periods.
Overture Partners works with university academic technology teams on both permanent and contract placements. We understand that these roles require candidates who bridge IT and academics — and we have a pipeline of professionals with exactly that background. Our higher education IT staffing team can help you assess your current roster and identify the gaps most likely to affect faculty satisfaction and program quality.
Building your academic technology team? Overture finds specialists who understand both the tech and the teaching. Learn more about our higher education IT staffing services.