The European Approach for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes: One Evaluation System, Not Many

A joint master's degree run by four universities in four countries has, historically, been asked to survive four separate national accreditation regimes — four self-assessment reports, four site visits, four sets of national criteria that sometimes contradict each other. The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) built a fix for this a decade ago. Most consortia still do not use it, and the ones that do quickly discover a quieter problem underneath: even with one accreditation procedure, they are still running four different course-evaluation systems and pretending the numbers are comparable.

The short answer: The European Approach for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes lets a joint programme undergo a single external quality-assurance procedure — one assessment against pan-European standards, by one EQAR-registered agency — instead of multiple national accreditations. But a single accreditation demands a single, coherent evidence base, and that is where most consortia fall down: student-feedback data collected on incompatible instruments across partners cannot be pooled or compared. If you adopt the European Approach, you should also unify how you evaluate the student experience across all delivery sites — otherwise you have harmonised the procedure but not the evidence.

What the European Approach actually is

Adopted by EHEA ministers in 2015, the European Approach was designed to ease the external quality assurance of joint programmes by defining standards based on the agreed tools of the EHEA — the European Standards and Guidelines (ESG) and the Qualifications Framework for the EHEA (QF-EHEA) — "without applying additional national criteria" (European Approach for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes, EQAR). In practice, a consortium can call on a single quality-assurance agency registered in the European Quality Assurance Register for Higher Education (EQAR) to organise one external assessment of the whole programme, based on a self-assessment report and a site visit (EQAR knowledge base).

The intended benefit is directness: institutions no longer have to run the same programme through several national frameworks in parallel. National QA bodies such as NVAO and ANVUR publish guidance for consortia choosing this route. Yet the European University Association has repeatedly noted that uptake remains limited relative to the number of joint programmes in Europe, partly because national legal frameworks do not always recognise the single procedure cleanly (EUA, "A first exploration of the European Approach"). The push behind initiatives such as the European Degree label is, in part, to make routes like this the default for genuinely European programmes.

The evidence problem the single procedure exposes

Here is the trap. The European Approach harmonises the procedure — one assessment, one panel, one set of standards. It does not, by itself, harmonise the evidence a consortium brings to that assessment. And the standards it references are explicit that a joint programme should be treated as a single, coherent whole, not a stack of national fragments.

Student feedback is where this bites hardest. A typical consortium inherits whatever each partner already uses: one university runs EvaSys, another a home-grown Qualtrics form, a third a paper instrument, a fourth an LMS-native tool. The scales differ (5-point here, 7-point there), the items differ, the timing differs, the languages differ, and the response-rate cultures differ. When the joint-programme panel asks "how does the student experience compare across your delivery sites," the honest answer is often that it cannot be compared, because the instruments were never designed to be. Averaging non-comparable Likert scores across sites — a bad idea within one institution — becomes indefensible across four.

This is not a minor operational annoyance. Comparability across sites is a substantive quality question for a joint programme: if students at one node have a systematically poorer experience, the consortium is obliged to know. A fragmented evaluation estate structurally prevents them from knowing.

Where Koji fits

Unifying course evaluation across a consortium is exactly the problem Koji for Education is built to solve. A single, multilingual instrument runs across every delivery site, so the questions, structure, and timing are consistent by design — the precondition for any legitimate cross-site comparison. Because Koji's interviews are AI-moderated and standardised, they remove the human-moderator inconsistency that plagues multi-country qualitative work, where a focus group facilitated differently in Milan and Maastricht yields non-comparable data.

For a joint programme, the qualitative layer is often more revealing than the numbers: automatic thematic analysis can show that "assessment workload" is a theme at one node but not another, or that integration between partners feels seamless to some cohorts and disjointed to others — programme-level insight that a self-assessment report for the European Approach can cite directly. Institution- and programme-level reporting lets the consortium present one coherent evidence base to one EQAR-registered agency, mapped to the ESG the panel is assessing against. And GDPR-compliant, EU-appropriate data handling — with consistent treatment of anonymity and data residency across borders — matters more, not less, when data flows between institutions in different member states. Koji does not replace the consortium's academic judgement or the accreditation panel; it gives them a single, comparable body of student-experience evidence to reason over.

Consortia whose partners also run broader institutional research can standardise on the same conversational engine via the main koji.so platform, extending the consistency beyond course evaluation.

But isn't standardisation the enemy of local context?

The strongest objection from academics is a good one: joint programmes are valuable because they are plural. A German technical partner, an Italian design partner, and a Dutch social-science partner bring different pedagogical cultures, and forcing one identical evaluation instrument on all of them risks flattening exactly the diversity the programme exists to celebrate. Standardisation, on this view, is a bureaucratic imposition dressed up as rigour.

The answer is to distinguish comparable from identical. A well-designed shared instrument fixes a common core — the constructs and scale that must be comparable across sites for the programme to be assured as one entity — while leaving room for site-specific and language-specific items that capture local context. Conversational, adaptive evaluation is unusually good at this: the common backbone stays constant while the interview probes into whatever is locally salient, so you gain comparability without erasing difference. Two honest limitations remain. First, the European Approach's low uptake means some national systems still create legal friction, and no evaluation tool resolves that — it is a policy problem, not a data problem. Second, cross-border feedback raises genuine data-governance questions (residency, lawful basis, anonymity thresholds for small cohorts) that a consortium must settle deliberately; a shared platform makes those choices consistent but does not make them for you. The goal is not sameness for its own sake, but an evidence base that can honestly answer the question the single accreditation procedure will ask.

Frequently asked questions

What is the European Approach for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes?

It is an EHEA framework, adopted in 2015, that lets a joint programme run by institutions in different countries undergo a single external quality-assurance procedure against pan-European standards (the ESG and QF-EHEA), performed by one EQAR-registered agency, instead of multiple national accreditations.

Does using the European Approach remove the need for national accreditation?

Where it is legally recognised, the single procedure is intended to substitute for parallel national accreditations. In practice, uptake has been limited because some national legal frameworks do not yet recognise the single procedure cleanly, which is one reason initiatives like the European Degree label are pushing to make such routes the default.

Why does a single accreditation procedure require unified course evaluation?

Because the programme is assessed as one coherent entity, the evidence must be coherent too. If each partner collects student feedback on a different instrument, scale, and timing, the data cannot be legitimately pooled or compared across sites — leaving the consortium unable to answer the comparability question the panel will ask.

How does Koji support joint-programme quality assurance?

Koji runs a single multilingual, standardised evaluation across all delivery sites, producing comparable quantitative and thematically analysed qualitative evidence at programme and institution level — a coherent evidence base a consortium can cite directly in a European Approach self-assessment report.

Does standardising evaluation erase the diversity of partner institutions?

It should not. A good design fixes a comparable common core while allowing site- and language-specific items; adaptive conversational evaluation keeps the shared backbone constant while probing local context, delivering comparability without forcing every partner into an identical mould.