EMJM Quality Assurance: Course Evaluation Evidence Guide (2026)

If your consortium runs — or is applying for — an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master (EMJM), your course-evaluation evidence has to satisfy two audiences at once: the external quality assurance system that accredits the programme, and the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) that funds and monitors it. Both expect evidence that a genuinely joint programme delivers consistent quality across every partner and every mobility window. This guide explains what EMJM quality assurance requires, where student-feedback evidence fits, and how to produce it in a form that both a review panel and your EACEA project officer will accept — with a requirement-by-requirement mapping to concrete outputs.

Note: EMJM is a competitive Erasmus+ funding scheme, not itself an accreditation body. The 2026 call closed on 12 February 2026 and funds roughly 30 projects. This guide covers the quality-assurance and monitoring obligations that come with running a funded EMJM; it is not application advice. Always confirm current requirements in the official Erasmus+ Programme Guide and your Grant Agreement.

What an EMJM is — and why its evaluation is distinctive

An Erasmus Mundus Joint Master is a prestigious, integrated study programme delivered by a consortium of higher education institutions from different countries, jointly designed and leading to a joint or multiple degree. Students move between partner institutions during the programme, and the curriculum is delivered by academics from several national systems.

That structure creates an evaluation problem most institutional systems were never designed for. A student on an EMJM might spend semester one in Sweden, semester two in Portugal, and a thesis period in Germany. If each host institution evaluates its own modules with its own tool, its own questions, and its own language, the resulting feedback cannot be compared across the programme — yet the entire premise of an EMJM, and the core question every reviewer asks, is whether it functions as one coherent, high-quality programme rather than three loosely connected local ones. Comparability across sites, languages, and cohorts is the defining requirement, and it is precisely what fragmented, per-partner surveying fails to deliver.

The quality-assurance obligations you must evidence

EMJM quality assurance sits on top of the wider European framework rather than replacing it. The obligations that student-feedback evidence speaks to fall into four groups.

1. External QA eligibility. At application stage, full partner HEIs must demonstrate they have fulfilled the external quality assurance requirements of their jurisdiction for the joint programme. The Programme Guide sets out three routes: (i) having successfully implemented the European Approach for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes (where national legislation allows), (ii) a specific accreditation or evaluation of the joint programme, or (iii) accreditation/evaluation of each national component on which the EMJM is composed. Whichever route applies, the external review will expect evidence that student feedback is systematically collected and used.

2. Adherence to the EHEA joint-programme standards. EMJMs must include "a jointly designed and fully integrated curriculum adhering to the Standards for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes in the European Higher Education Area." Those standards are built on the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the EHEA (ESG), including student-centred learning (ESG 1.3) and ongoing monitoring and periodic review (ESG 1.9).

3. Internal quality assurance and review deliverables. The award criteria require applicants to describe "the internal and external quality assurance measures of the master programme," and expected project deliverables include internal and external quality review reports. In practice this means a functioning internal QA loop — collect, analyse, act, and document — running across the consortium for the life of the grant.

4. EACEA monitoring and reporting. As a funded project, an EMJM is subject to EACEA monitoring throughout implementation, with periodic reporting on progress against objectives. Evidence that the consortium listens to students and improves the programme in response is a recurring theme of that reporting.

Mapping EMJM requirements to concrete evaluation outputs

The table below maps each obligation to the specific, comparable evidence a consortium needs to produce — and where a standardized evaluation instrument like Koji contributes.

EMJM requirement	What reviewers/EACEA want to see	Concrete output
External QA (European Approach / programme / component)	Systematic, documented student feedback feeding the reviewed programme	One standardized evaluation instrument applied at every partner site, with an audit trail
Fully integrated curriculum (EHEA joint standards)	Evidence the programme is experienced as coherent, not fragmented	Cross-site, cross-mobility comparison of the same evaluation questions
Student-centred learning (ESG 1.3)	Students' voice shaping teaching, learning, and assessment	Qualitative evidence of why behind ratings, not just scores
Monitoring & periodic review (ESG 1.9)	Trend data and closed feedback loops over time	Cohort and term-over-term trend reporting; action tracking
Attending to diverse cultural/linguistic backgrounds	Feedback that works across languages and academic cultures	Multilingual data collection with comparable, translated analysis
Internal/external quality review reports (deliverables)	Analysed, panel-ready evidence — not raw response dumps	Automatic thematic analysis with representative quotes and prevalence
EACEA progress reporting	Demonstrated responsiveness and improvement	Documented "you said / we did" record across reporting periods
Monitoring student workload (ECTS realism)	Evidence workload matches credit allocation across partners	Comparable workload questions asked identically at each site

Why standardized, comparable evidence is the crux

The single most common weakness a joint-programme panel finds is that the "programme" is really several local courses wearing one name, evidenced by several incompatible feedback datasets. If partner A uses a five-point Likert survey in Swedish, partner B uses a homegrown form in Portuguese, and partner C relies on informal end-of-module chats, the consortium cannot answer the panel's central question — is quality consistent across the programme? — because the data simply does not compare.

This is where a single standardized instrument changes the evidence base. Koji applies one bias-aware, multilingual AI-interview instrument identically across all partner sites and cohorts, so both the qualitative and quantitative data are comparable no matter where or in what language a student studied. It performs automatic thematic analysis for the self-evaluation report and quality review deliverables, provides cohort and term-over-term trend reporting for ESG 1.9 monitoring, and tracks actions against findings so each EACEA reporting period — and the eventual periodic review — can show closed feedback loops rather than a pile of unread comments. Because the interview adapts its follow-up questions to each student, it also captures the reasons behind ratings, which is what turns a score into evidence a panel can act on. The same AI interview engine underpins the broader Koji platform for user and customer research, adapted here for education.

Closing the loop across a consortium

Closing the loop is hard enough within one institution; across a multi-country consortium it is where many EMJMs lose marks. The evidence chain a reviewer wants is simple to state and hard to assemble: students raised X → the consortium (not just one partner) agreed action Y → the next cohort reported Z. Because Koji records actions against findings inside the platform, the consortium coordinator can produce that chain for the whole programme, not reconstruct it from three sets of local committee minutes. That single, shared record is often the difference between a monitoring report that reads as compliant and one that reads as genuinely well-managed.

When you might not need a new tool — or when a competitor fits

Honesty serves this decision better than a sales pitch. You may not need to change anything if your consortium already runs a single shared evaluation system that delivers comparable, multilingual, cross-site data with trend reporting and documented actions — in that case, map your real gaps before switching, because the marginal gain is smaller.

A general-purpose survey platform (EvaSys, Qualtrics, Webropol, or a national academic tool such as Nettskjema) may be the better fit when your priority is broad institutional surveying on a tool your partners already license, when your evaluation is primarily quantitative and your team codes open text efficiently, or when a hard data-residency policy dictates a specific national platform. Those tools are strong at what they were built for. The trade-off is that comparability, adaptive qualitative probing, automatic thematic analysis, and native closing-the-loop tracking then become manual work spread across the consortium — work that, at EMJM scale and across languages, is exactly what tends to slip. Choose based on the evidence you must produce, not on habit.

Related Resources

Frequently asked questions

What quality assurance does an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master require?

At application stage, full partner HEIs must demonstrate they have fulfilled the external QA requirements of their jurisdiction for the joint programme — via the European Approach for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes, a specific accreditation/evaluation of the joint programme, or accreditation of each national component. The curriculum must adhere to the EHEA Standards for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes, and the consortium must run internal quality assurance measures, produce internal/external quality review reports, and report progress to EACEA throughout the grant.

Why is course evaluation harder for an EMJM?

Students move between partner institutions in different countries and languages during the programme. If each partner evaluates its own modules with its own tool and questions, the feedback cannot be compared across sites — yet the panel's central question is whether the programme delivers consistent quality as one integrated, joint endeavour. Comparable, standardized, multilingual evidence is therefore essential, and per-partner surveying rarely provides it.

What evidence does EACEA monitoring expect?

As a funded project, an EMJM is monitored by EACEA throughout implementation and reports periodically on progress against objectives. Reviewers look for evidence that student feedback is systematically collected and analysed, that the consortium acts on it, and that the programme improves in response — a documented "you said / we did" record across reporting periods, supported by trend data and closed feedback loops, rather than raw response dumps.

How does Koji produce EMJM quality evidence?

Koji applies one standardized, bias-aware, multilingual AI-interview instrument identically across all partner sites and cohorts, so qualitative and quantitative data are comparable regardless of where or in which language a student studied. It performs automatic thematic analysis for self-evaluation reports and quality review deliverables, provides cohort and term-over-term trend reporting for ESG 1.9 monitoring, and tracks actions against findings so each EACEA reporting period and the periodic review can show closed feedback loops across the whole consortium.

Do we need a special tool for EMJM evaluation?

No — it is optional. If your consortium already runs a single shared evaluation system that delivers comparable, multilingual, cross-site data with trend reporting and documented actions, map your real gaps before switching. A general survey tool may be the better fit for broad institutional surveying, primarily quantitative evaluation, or a strict national data-residency policy. The trade-off is that comparability, adaptive qualitative probing, automatic analysis, and closing-the-loop tracking then become manual work spread across the consortium.

Is an EMJM the same as the European Approach for joint programmes?

No. The European Approach for Quality Assurance of Joint Programmes is an EHEA accreditation methodology that lets a consortium be reviewed once by a single EQAR-registered agency. An Erasmus Mundus Joint Master is an Erasmus+ funding scheme managed by EACEA. They intersect — implementing the European Approach is one accepted route to meeting an EMJM's external-QA eligibility — but an EMJM also carries its own funding, monitoring, and reporting obligations that the European Approach alone does not cover.

Course Evaluation Evidence for Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters (EMJM)