Foundation for Professional Development (FPD) Educational Design services delivers a comprehensive, coordinated and integrated academic development service to FPD. The vision of this area is to create innovative, evidence based high quality educational programmes in order to position FPD as a leading provider of Higher Education and Training.
Educational Design manages the curriculum and course design of qualifications as well as short learning programmes, as follows:
- Curriculum development of formal qualifications and short learning programmes
- Submission of short learning programmes to professional bodies for accreditation with regard to CPD points.
- Project manage the development of teaching and learning material
- Quality assurance of teaching and learning material
The instructional design services that offered include:
- design of teaching and learning material to support interactive teaching and learning by means of Educational Technology (EdTech) and Learning Experience Design (LXD) both for internal and external clients
- creation of technology-enhanced teaching and learning materials of exceptional standards through the use computer technology such as authoring software, HTML editors, graphic packages, and other standard multimedia and web development tools
- design and structure the participants learning experience by means of learning theories, concepts and strategies to improve quality of learning
- work collaboratively with academic staff in designing e-assessment and advising on teaching and learning strategies from an educational point of view
Contributions to the professional development of academic staff by facilitating programmes aimed at improving:
- curriculum development
- teaching practices
- assessment practices
- the use of technology in education
- accreditation
QUALITY ASSURANCE & EVALUATIONS
As a registered private higher education institution with a social mission, FPD is not only committed to complying with the relevant regulations and requirements but is dedicated to ensuring that quality assurance is implicit in all our activities to provide the optimal teaching and learning experience for our students as well as our teaching and support staff. WE thus aim to have quality culture embedded in our systems and activities.
Quality Assurance at FPD is a cycle of implementing new practices, reviewing current practices and refining our approach to deliver quality learning experiences. The FPD Quality Assurance and Evaluation (QAE) Unit is responsible for ensuring the quality of FPD’s educational products, management of regulatory compliance and reporting, and monitoring and evaluation activities. The QAE is also responsible for designing and implementing evaluations of internal and external donor-funded and commercial educational programmes.
Quality Assurance includes the following broad areas:
- Ensuring that the Academic Policies of FPD meet the standard of the relevant regulators, guide staff members and support students
- Promoting the professional development of Academic staff members according to individual and organisational needs
- Monitoring and refining educational practices to be in line with the Council on Higher Education’s Quality Assurance Framework and requirements for 21st century skills
- Reporting to regulatory authorities
- Submitting new qualifications to regulators for accreditation
- Participating in local and global dialogues on Higher Education in FPD’s areas of interest through various associations
Evaluation of academic programmes and training interventions is a systematic process of collecting information about teaching and learning activities, processes and outcomes, which can then be used for guiding decision making and for assessing the relevance and effectiveness of various educational products. Reasons for conducting evaluations on academic programmes and training interventions include:
- improving the training programme for future participants
- confirming that the money invested in training was well spent
- proving that the training programme is adding value or having the intended impact
FPD provides the following evaluation services:
- Development of M&E frameworks and plans, including log frames and theory of change.
- Development of monitoring systems (online and offline) to track implementation progress.
- Development of rigorous evaluation plans and research proposals to assess outcomes, efficiency, effectiveness, impact, and sustainability of a programme using social science methodologies.
- Development of quantitative and qualitative data collection tools (e.g., questionnaires/ surveys, interview schedules, etc).
- Implementation and management of programme evaluations.
- Analysis of quantitative and qualitative data using software such as SPSS and Atlat.Ti
- Dissemination of findings through high-quality reports, data visualisations, dashboards, and presentations.
- Other services offered:
- Rapid assessments and gap analyses
- Training needs assessments and skills audits
- Customer and Employee Satisfaction Survey
