Evaluating Erasmus+ Mobility: Why the Participant Report Isn't Enough

If your institution sends students on Erasmus+ exchanges, you already run an evaluation of every single one of them. At the end of each mobility, the European Commission's Beneficiary Module automatically sends the participant an EU Survey - the mandatory participant report - and the student must complete it to receive the final instalment of their grant (Erasmus+ participant report, eLAB). So the question is not whether you evaluate mobility. It is whether that mandatory report is telling you anything you can act on.

The short answer: not much. The participant report is a compliance-and-accountability instrument, designed so the Commission can aggregate satisfaction across millions of mobilities. It was never designed to help a specific International Office improve a specific partnership, and it inherits exactly the weakness this blog keeps documenting - it averages a satisfaction number over an experience that is anything but average. Evaluating mobility well means treating a semester abroad as the distinct object it is, not as a longer course.

A mobility is not a course

A course has one institution, one teacher, one syllabus. An Erasmus+ mobility has two institutions - the sending and the receiving university - sharing responsibility under the Erasmus Charter for Higher Education (ECHE), the quality framework every participating institution must sign, committing to full recognition of credits, a learning agreement, non-discrimination and quality support. The experience spans at least three domains that a course evaluation never touches: academic (did the host teaching work), linguistic (the student is often living and studying in a second language), and intercultural and personal (the outcomes most alumni say mattered most).

And the characteristic failure mode is different. The thing most likely to go wrong on an exchange is not an unclear lecturer; it is credit recognition on return. The programme takes this so seriously that there is a separate report-on-recognition survey, triggered specifically for students who indicate the recognition of their mobility period has not been finalised (EC Public Wiki, Manage Report on Recognition). The learning agreement - signed before, during and after mobility - is a condition of funding precisely because it is the instrument meant to prevent that failure. If you evaluate a mobility only on a satisfaction Likert, you will miss the outcome that determines whether the semester "counted" at all.

What the mandatory report cannot do

Three structural limits are worth naming.

First, it averages what should be disaggregated. A transformative exchange and a disastrous one average to "satisfactory." As we have argued about bimodal distributions, the mean is exactly the wrong summary when experiences are polarised - and mobility experiences are among the most polarised in higher education.

Second, it fires too late. The participant report arrives at the end, when the student is home and nothing can be fixed. A student who is isolated, mis-enrolled, or struggling linguistically in week three needs a formative touchpoint while abroad, not a retrospective questionnaire in month six.

Third, it cannot probe. A fixed pan-European form cannot ask the follow-up question. "Recognition not finalised - why? Which module, which department, what was the sticking point?" is unanswerable in a tick-box, yet it is the only version of the data an International Office can act on.

"But it's mandatory and standardised - isn't more evaluation just survey fatigue?"

This is the fair objection, and it constrains the answer. Students already complete an EU-level report; bolting a second parallel questionnaire onto every mobility would indeed risk the over-surveying that depresses response quality everywhere. So the answer is not another form running in parallel with the Commission's. It is two things the mandatory report structurally cannot be: a short, deep, mid-mobility check-in that catches fixable problems in time, and better use of narrative data at institution level so the recognition and partnership problems the aggregate survey only counts can actually be understood and closed.

A second objection deserves honesty: "intercultural growth is soft and unmeasurable, so why bother?" Intercultural competence is a real, named construct with validated instruments, so it is not unmeasurable in principle. But a single retrospective self-rating of "how much did I grow interculturally" is genuinely weak evidence - it is vulnerable to response-shift bias, where the student's own frame of reference changes over the mobility. That is an argument for open-ended probing and, where feasible, pre/post design - not for a bigger Likert battery.

Where Koji fits

Koji for Education does not replace the mandatory participant report - you are obliged to run that, and should. What it adds is the layer the EU form cannot provide.

Koji's AI-moderated conversational interviews probe the mobility experience with depth a fixed form cannot: when a student mentions a recognition problem, the interviewer follows up on which module and why, turning an unactionable tick-box into a specific, closeable issue. Because the interview can run mid-mobility as a formative check, problems surface while the student is still abroad and can still act. Its automatic thematic analysis reads hundreds of exchange narratives at once, so the International Office sees the pattern across a partnership rather than 300 isolated reports. It is multilingual by design - which matters enormously when participants are reflecting on a term lived in a second language, and a single-language survey would systematically under-capture the students having the hardest linguistic time (see our note on multilingual evaluation). And programme-level reporting lets you evaluate mobility the way it should be evaluated - by partnership and destination, not one student at a time. The same conversational-interview engine powers general user and alumni research on the main Koji platform, so a tracer study of returned exchange students uses the same method.

Framed honestly: Koji surfaces and probes what the aggregate survey only counts. It mitigates the depth, timing and recognition-visibility gaps in mobility evaluation; it does not claim to measure intercultural growth to two decimal places, because nothing credibly can.

If your International Office wants richer, earlier, multilingual insight into the exchanges you run - alongside the reporting the programme requires - talk to the Koji for Education team.

Don't forget the students you receive

Mobility evaluation is almost always one-directional: institutions survey their outgoing students and forget the ones arriving on their own campus. Yet incoming exchange students are, in many respects, a more revealing population. They experience your teaching without the shared assumptions a home cohort absorbs over years; they are the group most exposed to language-of-instruction friction, administrative onboarding and social integration; and their feedback is a direct, low-cost audit of how legible and welcoming your programmes actually are to an outsider. A satisfaction score buried in the Commission's aggregate will never surface that one department's induction leaves incoming students lost for a month.

Evaluating incoming mobility means asking different questions - about recognition in reverse, about the gap between what the course catalogue promised and what was delivered, about whether a second-language learner could actually follow the assessment brief. Run mid-semester, in the student's own language and analysed by partnership, that feedback tells your International Office where reciprocity is real and where it exists only on paper.

Frequently asked questions

Isn't the Erasmus+ participant report already a full evaluation? It is a mandatory accountability instrument sent automatically at the end of each mobility and tied to the final grant instalment. It lets the Commission aggregate satisfaction across the programme, but it is not designed to help an individual institution improve a partnership, catch problems in time, or understand why credit recognition failed.

What is the ECHE and why does it matter for evaluation? The Erasmus Charter for Higher Education is the quality framework every participating institution signs, committing to full credit recognition, a learning agreement, non-discrimination and quality support. It sets the outcomes your own mobility evaluation should actually check - especially recognition - rather than generic satisfaction.

What is the single most important thing to evaluate in a mobility? Credit recognition on return. It is the outcome that determines whether the semester counted, it is the most common point of failure, and the programme runs a separate recognition survey precisely because it so often is not finalised. A satisfaction score that ignores it misses the point.

Won't adding institutional evaluation cause survey fatigue? It would if you ran a second parallel questionnaire. The better approach is a short, deep mid-mobility check-in that the end-of-mobility EU report cannot be, plus richer analysis of narrative data - not more Likert batteries competing with the mandatory report.

How does Koji help evaluate mobility? Through conversational AI interviews that probe experiences (including specific recognition problems) with depth, a formative mid-mobility option that surfaces fixable issues in time, multilingual moderation for students living in a second language, automatic thematic analysis across many narratives, and partnership-level reporting - all alongside, not instead of, the required participant report.