Course Evaluation Evidence for AEQES Quality Evaluation (French-Speaking Belgium): A Buyer's Guide

Short answer: AEQES — the Agence pour l''évaluation de la qualité de l''enseignement supérieur — runs formative external quality evaluation of higher-education programmes and institutions in French-speaking Belgium (the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles). Crucially, it does not accredit, certify or rank: its job is continuous improvement, evidenced through your self-evaluation report (dossier d''autoévaluation) and a peer-review visit. Student course-evaluation data is one of the core internal evidence sources that report draws on. The practical task for a quality office is therefore to make that data standardised, longitudinal and demonstrably acted upon — which is exactly what a structured evaluation platform should produce. This guide maps AEQES expectations to concrete evaluation evidence and shows where a conversational, AI-moderated tool such as Koji helps.

Who AEQES is — and what it actually does

AEQES is an independent public agency of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, active since 2008-2009. It is a full member of ENQA (the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education) since 2011 and registered on EQAR (the European Quality Assurance Register) since 2012. Its référentiel is built on the revised European Standards and Guidelines (ESG) and the Bologna framework.

The single most important thing to understand — and where a lot of procurement framing goes wrong — is that AEQES practises formative evaluation, not accreditation. It does not award or withhold a credential, and it does not rank institutions. Instead it organises evaluation procedures, highlights good practice and shortcomings through expert peer review, and makes improvement-focused recommendations and follow-up. That distinction matters for evidence: AEQES is less interested in a single pass/fail score and more interested in whether you have a functioning quality loop — that you collect feedback, analyse it honestly, act on it, and can show the cycle turning over time.

AEQES covers the full breadth of French-Community higher education: universities, Hautes Écoles, Écoles supérieures des Arts and promotion-sociale (adult/continuing) institutions, across higher-education diplomas, bachelor''s and master''s programmes.

The two evaluation formats you must evidence

1. Programmatic evaluation — the established route, run in initial and continuous formats by field/cluster of study. The programme produces a self-evaluation report, hosts an expert peer-review visit, and follows up on recommendations. Student evaluation of teaching and of the programme experience is a standard input.

2. Institutional evaluation — introduced in 2019 and now governed by a new référentiel validated by the AEQES management committee in November 2024, adopted by the FWB Government in June 2025, and applying to institutional evaluations from 2026-2027. This référentiel examines how the institution''s governance and quality-management system fit its objectives. Its dimensions include strategic governance, quality policy and the quality-management system, and personnel — with the quality-management criterion expecting a system that is documented and that draws on the regular analysis of internal and external evaluation results. Student course-evaluation data is a primary feed into that analysis.

In both formats, the burden of proof sits in your self-evaluation report. Strong reports do not just assert "we collect student feedback"; they show standardised instruments, response evidence, honest analysis, and the actions taken in response.

Why course-evaluation evidence is where reports succeed or fail

The recurring weakness AEQES expert panels flag — like quality agencies across the EHEA — is the action gap: institutions that collect plenty of student feedback but cannot demonstrate the loop closing. A pile of Likert averages with no narrative of what changed is weak evidence. What an ESG-aligned, improvement-focused panel wants to see is:

• Standardised instruments used consistently across cohorts, so trends are comparable.
• Genuine qualitative insight, not just satisfaction percentages, so the reasons behind ratings are visible.
• Longitudinal data across several cycles, so improvement (or its absence) is demonstrable.
• Documented actions linking specific feedback to specific changes — the closed loop.

This is the lens to bring to any evaluation tool: not "does it run a survey?" but "does it produce defensible, longitudinal, action-linked evidence with minimal manual reconstruction?"

Mapping AEQES expectations to evaluation evidence and Koji outputs

AEQES expectation (ESG-aligned)	Evidence a panel wants	How Koji produces it
ESG 1.3 / student-centred learning; programme experience captured	Consistent, comparable student evaluation across modules and cohorts	Standardised, bias-aware AI-moderated interviews asked comparably to every student
Honest analysis, not just satisfaction scores	Thematic findings showing why students rate as they do	Automatic thematic analysis of every interview into committee-ready themes
Quality-management criterion: regular analysis of internal/external evaluation results	Longitudinal, structured datasets feeding institutional review	Cohort-level, period-over-period reporting retained across cycles
Continuous improvement / follow-up (suivi) on recommendations	Documented actions linked to feedback — the closed loop	Built-in action tracking that ties changes back to specific findings
Formative as well as summative evaluation	Evidence the institution acts during delivery, not only after	Mid-module formative interviews alongside end-of-term collection
ESG / GDPR data handling and student trust	Confidential, GDPR-compliant processing of student data	EU/GDPR data handling with EU data residency

The point is not that a tool wins accreditation — there is no accreditation to win with AEQES. It is that the quality of your evidence is what a formative panel rewards, and conversational interviews plus automatic thematic analysis produce richer, more defensible evidence than a static questionnaire and a sentiment percentage.

Closing the loop is the whole point

Because AEQES is formative, the follow-up stage — demonstrating that recommendations and student feedback led to concrete change — carries disproportionate weight. A self-evaluation report that says "students raised concerns about assessment feedback turnaround; we introduced a two-week return policy, communicated it, and the following cohort''s interviews show the concern resolved" is far stronger than any dashboard. Tracking those action-to-outcome chains across cycles is exactly the kind of longitudinal documentation that is painful to reconstruct after the fact and straightforward to maintain if your tool captures it as you go.

This is also where the main Koji platform shares its engine: the same AI-moderated interview and thematic-analysis approach Koji uses for product and customer research underpins the education product, applied here to teaching, learning and the quality cycle.

Honest note: where a simpler tool fits

If your programme runs a small, stable evaluation with low volume and your panel is satisfied with standardised Likert instruments plus a handful of open comments, a well-configured general survey tool — or your existing institutional platform — may be entirely sufficient, and changing tools mid-cycle carries its own risk. AEQES does not mandate any particular software, and a clear, consistently applied simple instrument beats a sophisticated one used inconsistently. The case for a conversational, AI-moderated approach is strongest when your weak point is qualitative depth and demonstrable closing of the loop — the two things formative panels probe hardest — rather than survey logistics alone.

A practical checklist for AEQES-ready evidence

Before your self-evaluation report goes to the expert panel, audit your course-evaluation evidence against the questions a formative, ESG-aligned reviewer will actually ask:

• Is the instrument standardised across the cluster? If each programme runs a different questionnaire, you cannot show comparable trends. Use a consistent core instrument so cohort-to-cohort and module-to-module comparisons hold up.
• Can you show more than satisfaction? A panel that sees only "85% satisfied" will ask what students actually meant. Have themed qualitative findings ready that explain the drivers behind the numbers, with anonymised illustrative evidence.
• Is the data longitudinal? One cycle is a snapshot; AEQES rewards a quality loop turning. Hold at least two or three cycles so improvement — or persistent weakness — is visible.
• Can you name the actions? For each significant theme, can you point to a decision, a communication to students, and a subsequent check that it worked? This action-to-outcome chain is the single most persuasive element of a formative report.
• Is the data handling defensible? Confirm confidentiality of student responses, your lawful basis, retention period, and — if a third-party tool is involved — the processing location and the data-processing agreement.

A worked example

A Haute École preparing a continuous programmatic evaluation finds that two successive cohorts raise the same concern: feedback on assessments arrives too late to help with the next piece of work. Rather than reporting a low score in isolation, the self-evaluation narrative reads: the issue was identified through standardised end-of-module student interviews; a four-week-to-two-week return policy was introduced and communicated; mid-module formative interviews the following year show the concern no longer surfaces. That is a closed loop, evidenced longitudinally — precisely the demonstration AEQES exists to encourage, and the kind of narrative that is trivial to assemble when your tool captures themes and actions as you go, and laborious to reconstruct afterwards from spreadsheets of Likert averages.

Related Resources

• Turning Course Evaluations into NVAO Accreditation Evidence (Netherlands & Flanders) — the accreditation regime covering Dutch-speaking Belgium
• Turning Student Feedback into ESG / ENQA Accreditation Evidence — the European standards AEQES is built on
• Course Evaluation Evidence for French Accreditation (Hceres & CTI) — the neighbouring Francophone system
• Does Closing the Feedback Loop Actually Matter? The Evidence — why the action stage carries the most weight
• Course Evaluation Evidence for the UK TEF and QAA Quality Review — a contrasting national approach

Next step: If your AEQES self-evaluation or institutional review is on the horizon, see how Koji turns student interviews into standardised, longitudinal, action-linked evidence.