Course Writer
Unifrog
- Closing: 6:51pm, 7th Feb 2024 GMT
Job Description
Unifrog’s mission
We’re on a mission to level the playing field when it comes to young people finding and applying for their next step after school. We're achieving this by bringing all the available information into one single, impartial, user-friendly platform that helps students to make the best choices, and submit the strongest applications. We also empower teachers and counsellors to manage the progression process effectively. Our outlook is global - we work with schools and universities all over the world, from the US to New Zealand, and from Italy to Hong Kong. We want to make it so that young people can compare every opportunity taught in English, wherever it is in the world, and have all the support they need to make successful applications. We have a clear social purpose, and we’re hugely ambitious. We already work with over half of UK secondary schools, and hundreds of international schools. We are growing rapidly in terms of the number of our customers, in terms of how much they use our platform, and in terms of the breadth of products we offer (check out this video to hear more about the Unifrog platform). Our team is at the heart of our business and is integral to our success. We work hard to foster a culture of openness, happiness and innovation, and we commit to helping every individual learn and grow so that they can reach their full potential. We want to hire talented people, whatever their background. If you are excited by our mission and are ready to work hard, please don’t hesitate to apply. We look forward to hearing from you! We believe in the power of diversity. If you are from an ethnic minority background, we would like to strongly encourage you to apply. In advance of applying if you have any questions about working at Unifrog, please contact our Diversity Champions, Hannah and Farhana.
Courses at Unifrog
Our new Courses tool which launched in December 2023 is available to 1.6 million students around the world. Students can browse and take short online courses in a range of engaging and challenging topic areas, many of which are created in partnership with universities and employers.
We’re creating courses that fit into 3 main strands:
Careers education courses will help students to explore their interests and develop career readiness skills.
Career taster courses, created in collaboration with top employers, will give students an insight into what it’s really like to work in a particular industry.
University subject tasters, created in collaboration with leading universities, will give students a flavour of what studying a particular university subject is like.
Our courses are designed to be engaging, interactive, and appropriately challenging for our student users, helping them to build essential skills and knowledge to prepare them for their next steps after school or college.
The course creation process
Course creation is an exciting, collaborative process with the Course Writer at the very heart of each project. After receiving content and materials from partner organisations, you'll work closely with our in-house written content and video teams to create an engaging and high-quality course.
The role and responsibilities:
Research a course topic by collating information from a variety of sources. This might include websites, presentations, notes, essays, leaflets or handbooks, and you may also carry out some virtual video interviews. You will need to synthesise this information in order to establish a solid foundation for course development.
Refine, adapt and structure raw content and material from partner organisations into a coherent and engaging overall course structure. This will involve organising content into a series of sessions, ensuring a logical and progressive learning experience for students.
Write concise, accurate and useful course content for each of the course sessions, incorporating text, image and video elements in creative ways to engage your student audience.
Design engaging course activities which reinforce key concepts, assess understanding, and create opportunities for interactive learning experiences. Active learning is crucial here, and students should be encouraged to use higher order thinking skills wherever possible.
Write model answers and automated answer feedback, providing valuable insights to students to help them assess their understanding of a topic.
Respond to and action feedback from your line manager, from others on the Unifrog team, and from external partners. This iterative feedback process ensures continuous improvement and refinement of the course content, aligning it with evolving educational standards.
You will play a key role in shaping the future of our Courses tool, and your work will influence the learning journeys of over a million students around the world.
What we’re looking for:
Adept at creating exceptional teaching resources
Above all else, you need to be brilliant at creating teaching resources, and to love doing it. You will have had significant professional experience creating teaching resources and delivering them to students. You’ll need to be able to demonstrate an excellent understanding of teaching and learning principles, and to be able to tailor course material to suit the needs of the student audience.
Excellent written communication
You’ll need to be an excellent writer who can make complex topics accessible, engaging and interesting for a student audience.
Attention to detail
You’ll need to be able to proofread and edit to UK grammar and spelling rules, and to a company’s House Style.
Research skills
You should be able to collate information from a variety of sources, summarising, organising and structuring key concepts and ideas in an informative and engaging way.
Creativity
We want you to come up with great ideas for how to teach topics to students in fun ways.
Desire for feedback
We want to be as close to our users as possible. You’ll be able to seek out feedback from colleagues, teachers, and students.
Ability to work in a team
You’ll regularly ask team members for their input; to do this, you need to be an excellent communicator and team player.
Ability to work independently
Creating new courses is a long-term project that requires organisation, discipline, and resilience.
Ability to work to tight deadlines
We’re really excited about our upcoming projects. We have a long list of them to get done, and many have hard deadlines. You need to be able to deliver things on time.
Working together
You’ll work in our Teaching Resources team alongside experienced teachers and resource creators, and you may need to liaise with people in our Written Content and Video teams too.
In the Teaching Resources team, we commonly brainstorm new ideas as a group, share insights from our own teaching experiences, provide feedback on other team members’ work, and get feedback from teachers and students at our partner schools.
You’ll be managed by the Head of Teaching Resources.
Key benefits
Head to our jobs page for a full list of the excellent benefits we offer our team.
Join one of ‘the best organisations to escape to’ and help transform careers and destinations in schools.
Become part of a committed, dynamic, and growing company. We want to build our team for the long term: if you do well, we will do our best to make sure you want to stay at the company for a long time.
Professional development is important at Unifrog. You will define your own 6-month objectives and will be supported by your line manager and the rest of the team to achieve them. You will have an annual training allowance to spend on what you need to grow and progress.
Influence the company’s direction: we love to promote great ideas, wherever they come from.
Key details
£34,000 - £36,000 per year depending on experience, plus a share in a company-wide performance bonus. Grade B.
Full-time for 12 months.
You must have qualified teacher status, and have taught in a secondary school or college.
28 days paid holiday per year (plus bank holidays).
Working hours are 9:00am to 5:00pm, Monday to Thursday, and 9:00am to 4:30pm on Friday.
Work remotely or in our London office.
Start date: as soon as possible, though we will be flexible for the right candidates.
To discuss any details about the role before applying, please contact Mhairi (details on our website)
We can only consider candidates who have the right to work in the UK.
Application process
Deadline: 10:00am (GMT) on Tuesday 6th February 2024.
Stage 1: Application form (~1 hour) ✍️
Visit our website to upload your CV and complete the questions and tasks below.
Please note that we do not review CVs at this stage of the application process so please be as specific as possible about your experience. i. Why do you want to work at Unifrog? (250 words) ii. With reference to the job description and your experience, what would make you an excellent candidate for this role? (250 words)
iii. We’re creating a course for 14-16 year old students who want to learn more about what it means to be self-employed in the UK.
Section 1 of the course, which explains what self-employment is, has already been written.
Your task is to write part of Section 2 of the course, which will explain the advantages and disadvantages of being self-employed.
Write 250 words to be included in Section 2, either on:
the main advantages of being self-employed
OR
the main disadvantages of being self-employed
Feel free to use headings and bullet points to structure your writing. Do not add activities.
Stage 2: Task (~ 2 hours)
Stage 3: Video call interview (1 hour) 🖥️
Standard Q&A from a panel of three, including questions about your experiences and how these relate to the role, and scenario questions based on common situations you might face (plus time for your questions).
Video call interviews will be held w/c 12th February 2024.
Your answers are an opportunity to let us know more about your motivations and experience. While we understand that candidates might want to use AI to improve parts of their application, we strongly encourage you to write your answers independently.
Please note, we compare all answers to an AI generated answer. Where we suspect AI has been used to write the majority of the answer, this will be taken into consideration when scoring.
Inclusion and diversity at Unifrog
Within the company we try to foster a culture of innovation, and a happy working environment, both because this is the right thing to do, and because we think this results in the most effective team. To this end we believe in open communication, celebrating successes, supporting each other, not being afraid to be wrong or to fail, and promoting good ideas wherever they come from.
As a platform that supports teachers and students from a huge variety of backgrounds it’s important that our team and leadership reflects this diversity. This is something we are actively working towards and prioritising. We want to embed diversity, equity and inclusion across everything we do, continually evaluating policies and practices to make sure they are inclusive and equitable.
To make sure everyone’s voice is heard and people have the opportunities to learn to be better allies in the workplace, we encourage the team to share what they’re celebrating, facilitate training and group discussions, and seek regular feedback about what more the company could do to help people feel included.
To ensure that our recruitment process is consistent and fair, we anonymise your application and therefore do not see your name, personal, educational or professional background. We also randomise the order of responses so that it’s less likely that a candidate is advantaged or disadvantaged by where their answers appear compared to other candidates.
Removing bias from the hiring process
Applications closed Wed 7th Feb 2024
Removing bias from the hiring process
- Your application will be anonymously reviewed by our hiring team to ensure fairness
- You’ll need a CV/résumé, but it’ll only be considered if you score well on the anonymous review
Applications closed Wed 7th Feb 2024