QED’s Training Experience

CONTEXT

QED Group is an elite strategic management consulting firm that drives higher impact, better decisions, and performance management using data as its foundation. For the last 19 years, QED has helped its clients in the use of data to optimize programming decisions.

QED offers innovative solutions for organizational excellence. We seek to enhance the impact and capacity of our client’s staff and learning communities through customized services in organizational and leadership development, facilitation, technical assistance, and evaluation. To successfully deliver trainings, QED brings expertise in curriculum design and development, logistics for optimum delivery, and technology skills for creating online courses or blended learning.

BLENDED LEARNING APPROACHQED’s Training services promote a blended learning approach which combines in-person and online interaction to drive the highest learning impact. Blended learning approaches move beyond the traditional classroom setting and may include participatory and selfpaced modules, interactive and stand-alone courses, videos, webinars, and other distance-learning techniques. Through expanded access to ideas and information, cultivation of champions, and use of technology, QED’s training process deepens the engagement of practitioners and clients to build enhanced learning communities.

A close partnership between QED trainers and the client is central to the successful development and delivery of trainings and courses that are relevant, timely, and appropriate to both the client and participants’ needs. Our training team includes instructional designers, adult learning specialists, programmers, and client leads who collaborate to develop the blended learning approach. This partnership approach requires close collaboration every step of the way and shared responsibility for course development. In doing this, QED facilitates and supports the client’s ability to develop and deliver the content they know best to the audiences they know best, and results in true ownership by the client of the final product.

TRAINING AREAS

In-person classroom training

  • Self-paced modules
  • Interactive and participatory courses
  • Webinars & videos
  • Facilitated learning networks
  • Other e-learning techniques

HIGHLIGHTS OF OUR WORK

  • Designed, organized, and conducted a training program for USAID/Uganda on Collaboration, Learning & Adapting (CLA), aimed at highlighting the interplay among Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning (MEL) processes to improve results. The program combined theory and practice in an experiential approach to learning using case studies, tools, frameworks, and models, role plays, simulations, and structured practices relevant to participants’ current program work.
  • For several DC-based USAID bureaus and offices, prepared courses using a blended learning approach on topics such as Agriculture Project Design, Climate Smart Course, Cost-Benefit Analysis Course, CSA GLEE Amplification, and a Performance Monitoring Course.
  • Provided instructional design and logistical support for USAID’s Economic Growth Office Advanced Topics course. The course objectives provide economic growth officers with a better understanding of key economic topics and issues; apply the potential policy or programming responses to those issues and accompanying tools; and build a community of practice among USAID economists.
  • Worked with USAID/Turkmenistan to develop a Tourism and Gender Training component for the Turkmenistan Tourism Seminar. Topics included how gender ties to economic development and tourism; traditional gender roles and gender wage gaps; and government incentives for employers to take measures to advance all women and all men.
  • For the Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, developed a series of electronic gender training modules (Gender 101, 102 and 103), which were posted to USAID University online.
  • Co-authored and led the development of the Effective Gender Integration Practices for Agriculture, a six-part series to assist Mission staff in making gender central to the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of successful agriculture programs.
  • For USAID/OTI, QED developed a 2-day Gender Integration in Political Transitions and Post-Conflict Programming training with DC and field staff in DCHA and PPL, focusing on concrete examples and action-oriented practices. This includes a two-hour online training for participants to identify and address gender constraints and gender-based exclusions and to promote gender equity in political transitions and post-conflict programming. QED trained staff to modify online training content and functionality so that the module could be updated and adapted as needed.
  • Other training module topics include: Integrating Innovation in the Corporate Ecosystem, Principles of Human-Centered Design, Systematic Inventive Thinking, Persuasive Technology, Principles of Data Analytics, Measuring Innovation, Designing for Customer Value Exchange, Information Visualization for Data Analysis and Informed Decision-Making, Principles of Narrative Visualization and Data-Driven Storytelling.

INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN: ADDIE MODELQED approaches instructional design through the iterative process of ADDIE to developing training and learning activities:

  • Analysis: identify training needs and audience; develop a conceptual framework and learning goals/objectives; determine organizational outcomes; define success
  • Design: link instructional needs with appropriate learning formats
  • Develop: create/refine content and practical application activities; rehearse content delivery
  • Implement: validate product/activities with audience