The Digital Training Companion: an innovative approach to teaching and training evaluation
Teachers’ professional development and training should be research-based and data-driven. Developed at the Center LEARN, the Digital Training Companion is a training evaluation tool offering a solution based on translational research.
The Digital Training Companion (DTC) is a web application developed at the Center for Learning Sciences (LEARN) to help trainers design, monitor and improve teacher-training programmes using real data (from participants characteristics to organizational condition and students’ learning outcomes) rather than satisfaction surveys alone. It lets training teams build custom surveys, set up a full monitoring plan tailored to each programme, track results in real time, and log every adjustment made to a training action in a logbook — supporting continuous improvement from assessment design to classroom impact.
The tool grew out of EPFL’s work on the EduNum reform project (2017–2022), which introduced digital education across schools in Vaud. Since the end of this project, the DTC has grown well beyond its original context. With support from the BeLEARN hub, two successive rounds of funding allowed the team to test the tool in the canton of Bern, with the Bern University of Teacher Education, Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH), and in the Canton of Ticino, with the University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI), which allowed to implement the tool in dozens of other teaching contexts over the past years.
A spin-off to carry the project forward: evalution
To make this work sustainable beyond academia, the team founded the association evalution, which now offers evaluation and data-driven training-improvement services to a wider range of organisations.
Evalution reflects a broader shift among organisations that increasingly want to ground their training programmes in learning-science evidence rather than intuition. By spinning the DTC out as an independent service, the team can now support institutions such as schools, training bodies, and companies wanting to measure and strengthen the real-world impact of their training.
