The Digital Training Companion: an innovative approach to monitoring
Teachers’ professional development should be 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 LEARN Learning Sciences Center to help trainers design, monitor and improve teacher-training programmes using real data 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 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 other Swiss cantons and abroad — including a collaboration with Réseau Canopé (the French teacher-training body) and the Singapore Institute of Technology, which trained dozens of trainers on the tool over the past year.
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.
