Koji vs Microsoft Forms for Course Evaluation (2026)

Almost every European university already has Microsoft Forms. It ships with Microsoft 365 Education, costs nothing extra, sits inside an environment IT has already vetted, and anyone can build a survey in minutes. For many departments it is the default course-evaluation tool by inertia rather than by decision. Koji takes a fundamentally different approach: instead of a static questionnaire, it runs AI-moderated conversational interviews with students at scale and themes the qualitative output automatically.

This comparison is written for QA directors, deans of teaching and learning, institutional-research leads, and procurement teams asking the honest question: "We already have Microsoft Forms — is it enough for course evaluation, or do we need a dedicated tool?" We represent Microsoft Forms accurately, including the real advantages of its zero cost and tenant integration, then show where a purpose-built evaluation platform produces stronger evidence.

The short answer

Stay with Microsoft Forms if your need is genuinely lightweight: occasional pulse checks, a quick mid-term poll, a single department running simple end-of-module surveys, or any situation where "free, already compliant within our tenant, no procurement" outweighs depth of analysis. For a great many low-stakes uses, Forms is the pragmatic and correct choice — and you already own it.

Choose Koji when course evaluation is part of your formal quality cycle and accreditation evidence base — where you need probing qualitative feedback, automatic thematic analysis, standardised moderation, longitudinal cohort reporting, and a documented closed loop, rather than a folder of disconnected Excel exports that someone still has to read and code by hand.

The decisive question is not "which builds a survey faster" — both build a survey quickly. It is "what happens to the answers." Forms gives you raw responses; Koji gives you analysed, actionable, accreditation-ready evidence.

At a glance

Dimension	Microsoft Forms	Koji
Core method	Fixed questionnaire (8 question types incl. Likert, NPS, rating)	AI-moderated conversational interviews
Qualitative depth	Open-text boxes, no follow-up	Adaptive follow-up probing on every answer
Branching/logic	Section-level jumps only; no per-question conditional logic or answer piping	Conversational, adapts to each student in real time
Analysis	Basic charts; export to Excel/CSV; manual coding of comments	Automatic thematic analysis with quotes and prevalence
Closing the loop	None built in	Action tracking from themes to interventions
Longitudinal reporting	Manual, per-form; no cohort model	Standardised cohort reporting across terms
Built for course evaluation	General-purpose form tool	Purpose-built for course/programme evaluation
Cost	Included free with Microsoft 365 Education	Custom quote (not public as of publication)
Compliance	Inherits your M365 tenant DPA; EU Data Boundary for Microsoft 365	EU/GDPR data handling, EU hosting

As of publication, Koji does not publish standard list pricing and quotes by institution size and scope. Microsoft Forms is included at no additional cost in Microsoft 365 Education plans; response ceilings are very high (Microsoft documents up to 5,000,000 responses on business and education plans).

Where Microsoft Forms is genuinely strong

It would be dishonest to dismiss Microsoft Forms. For its intended purpose it is excellent, and the advantages are real:

Zero marginal cost and zero procurement. It is already in your Microsoft 365 Education tenant. There is no contract to negotiate, no new vendor to onboard, and no incremental licence spend — a serious advantage when budgets are tight.
Inherited compliance posture. Because Forms data lives inside your existing Microsoft 365 tenant, it falls under the data-processing agreement and security controls your institution has already approved. Microsoft also operates the EU Data Boundary for Microsoft 365, which matters to European institutions standardised on Microsoft. For many information-security teams, "it is already in our approved tenant" clears a hurdle a new tool has to climb.
Familiarity and speed. Staff already know it. Building a quick survey takes minutes, results appear in real time, and exports drop straight into Excel and the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite.
Adequate question types for simple instruments. Forms supports choice, text, rating, ranking, date, file upload, Likert, and Net Promoter Score questions — enough to replicate a basic Likert SET instrument.

If your requirement is a lightweight, occasional survey and the analysis burden is small, Forms does that job well and is hard to justify replacing.

Where the general-purpose form model hits its limits

The constraints below are not unique to Microsoft Forms — they are inherent to any fixed-questionnaire tool, and they bite hardest precisely when evaluation feeds quality assurance and accreditation:

No adaptive follow-up. A form cannot ask why. If a student writes "the labs were confusing," the most useful detail — which lab, what was unclear, what would have helped — is never captured, because the instrument cannot probe.
Limited branching. Microsoft Forms supports section-level jumps but not per-question conditional logic, answer piping, or logic that combines conditions. The form cannot adapt to an individual student the way a conversation does.
No built-in qualitative analysis. Forms gives you charts on closed items and a column of raw free-text. Turning hundreds of comments into themes is manual, slow, inconsistent between coders, and routinely skipped at scale — so the richest evidence goes underused.
No closing-the-loop mechanism. There is no native way to link feedback to an action, track whether the action happened, or re-evaluate. The "you said, we did" cycle that accreditors look for has to be assembled by hand outside the tool.
No evaluation-specific scaffolding. Forms is a general survey builder. It has no cohort model, no longitudinal benchmarking, no role-based dashboards for deans, and no anonymity workflow tuned to the sensitivities of student evaluation of teaching. Each form is an island.

These are exactly the gaps a purpose-built platform is designed to close.

How Koji is different

Koji replaces the static questionnaire with an AI-moderated interview. Each student has a short conversational session in which the AI asks an opening question and then probes adaptively — "Can you give an example?", "What would have made that clearer?" — the way a skilled human researcher would, but consistently and across an entire cohort.

Adaptive probing turns "the labs were confusing" into a specific, actionable account of which lab, why, and what would help.
Automatic thematic analysis clusters every response into themes with representative quotes and prevalence — no manual coding backlog in Excel.
Standardised moderation means every student gets the same calibrated interviewer, reducing the inconsistency of free-text comment boxes while keeping qualitative richness.
Formative collection lets you gather feedback mid-module, while there is still time to act, not only in an end-of-term post-mortem.
Closing the loop is built in: themes convert into tracked actions, so you can document not just what students said but what changed.
EU/GDPR data handling with EU hosting keeps you aligned with European data-protection expectations.

The same AI interview engine powers the main Koji platform (koji.so) for general customer and user research — the education product applies that engine to course and programme evaluation.

Evidence quality for accreditation

For ESG/ENQA, NVAO, ANVUR, AACSB, and programme revalidation, the value of evaluation is the evidence it produces. A pile of Microsoft Forms exports demonstrates that you collected feedback; it does not, on its own, demonstrate that you understood and acted on it. Koji's auto-themed qualitative findings plus built-in action tracking map directly onto the "ongoing monitoring and closing the loop" expectations of these frameworks. See our companion guide on turning student feedback into ESG accreditation evidence for the detailed mapping, and the broader best course evaluation software for European universities overview.

When Microsoft Forms is the better choice

Be honest with your own requirements. Microsoft Forms is likely the right tool if:

Your need is occasional or low-stakes — a quick poll, a one-off pulse check, a single module — and the analysis effort is trivial.
Zero cost and zero procurement are decisive, and the data never has to leave the Microsoft 365 environment your IT team has already approved.
You only need simple descriptive results (counts, averages, basic charts) and have no requirement for thematic analysis, cohort benchmarking, or a documented quality loop.
A department wants to experiment before any institutional investment in evaluation tooling.

In those cases, paying for a dedicated platform would be over-engineering. The calculus changes when evaluation becomes load-bearing for quality assurance and accreditation — then the manual analysis burden and the missing closed loop become the real cost, and "free" stops being cheap.

Bottom line

Microsoft Forms is a genuinely good general-purpose survey tool — free, familiar, and already inside your compliant tenant. Koji is a course-evaluation and qualitative-evidence platform that overcomes the structural limits of fixed forms with moderated AI interviews, automatic thematic analysis, and closing-the-loop action tracking. If your evaluation is lightweight, keep using Forms. If evaluation underpins your quality cycle and accreditation file, the bottleneck is not collecting responses — it is understanding and acting on them at scale, and that is where Koji leads.

Want to see moderated interviews on your own modules? Explore Koji for Education.