Monitoring and evaluation for empowering teacher trainers and teachers in aquisition and transfer of digital competences.
A research-practice partnership established in 2018 between the Centre LEARN and the Canton of Vaud during the EduNum reform’s pilot phase led to the development of a framework for enhancing digital education teacher training. This framework evolved into the Digital Training Companion (DTC), a web application designed to foster information-sharing among trainers, teachers, and students throughout training stages. Our current research aims to better understand the mechanisms, quality and effects of DTC on the quality of professional digital competence training. To achieve this, we are employing a pre-post quasi-experimental design to measure how effectively DTC facilitates knowledge transfer for the pre- and in-service teachers and their pupils› learning outcomes. We anticipate discovering significant connections between the use of DTC in digital competence training and improvements in training outcomes. By moving beyond simple satisfaction surveys towards a more complete and structured assessment of teacher training, these findings could underscore the plus-value of a paradigm shift in evaluation and regulation culture within teacher training. This research has the potential to inform policy and practice in digital literacy education, contributing to the broader goals of the «Suisse Numérique» strategy.
This project is a second study in the experimental sequence aimed at investigating the pedagogical potential of DTC for digital teaching and learning. It aims to extend the previous descriptive and qualitative results of Study 1 and to enrich them with statistically sound data. During Study 1, the professional development course on subject-oriented teaching with digital technologies was designed by integrating the DTC into the course structure. It helped not only to structure the course according to the students› strengths and weaknesses in the use of digital technologies, but also to select the most relevant materials, to refine the activities and to test the pre-post test measures, as well as to support the trainers› self-regulation. The same course will be used as a material for the current study with a more representative sample of in-service and pre-service teachers in the spring semester 2025. The interim results have demonstrated the pedagogical value of the DTC for practising teachers and will be further explored using quantitative research methods.
The developer’s efforts during this project are focused on transforming the experimental prototype into a robust, production-ready web application that meets rigorous reliability and security standards and is ready for public release by the end of the project. This process will involve extensive testing, optimisation and implementation of industry-standard security measures to prepare the platform for widespread use in educational settings.
This planned public release provides a direct and immediate pathway for the results of the project to be integrated into educational practice. Once released, the web application will be accessible to a wide range of educational stakeholders, including trainers, teachers and institutions. This availability will allow the rapid adoption and implementation of the project’s findings and the pedagogical possibilities of the monitoring and evaluation tools in real educational settings.
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