What the Tirana Communiqué Means for Course Evaluation: Student Voice in the EHEA to 2030

Answer up front: The Tirana Communiqué, adopted by ministers of the 49-country European Higher Education Area (EHEA) on 30 May 2024, never uses the phrase "course evaluation." Yet its four headline priorities — student-centred learning, the social dimension, the fundamental values of higher education, and the digital transition — each carry a direct, checkable implication for how universities gather and use student feedback. Read carefully, the communiqué reframes course evaluation from an administrative ritual into evidence a system claims to take seriously. A single satisfaction mean, collected from the minority of students who bothered to respond, does not meet that bar.

What Tirana actually committed to

On 29–30 May 2024, meeting in Tirana to mark 25 years of the Bologna Process, ministers adopted the Tirana Communiqué, the successor to the Rome Communiqué of 2020. The European University Association and ENQA both summarised the next working cycle around a familiar cluster: fundamental values, mobility, the digital and green transitions, the social dimension, and student-centred learning. Crucially, ministers endorsed a set of indicators and descriptors for the Principles and Guidelines to Strengthen the Social Dimension, and committed to a progress report on their implementation by 2027.

None of this is a directive. The Bologna Process is soft law — coordinated commitments, peer review, and reputational pressure, not enforceable regulation. But soft law is exactly the register in which quality assurance operates. When your national QA agency conducts its next institutional review against the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the EHEA (ESG), it will look for evidence that these commitments are lived, not just signed. Course evaluation is one of the most visible places that evidence either exists or does not.

Student-centred learning is an evaluation claim, not a teaching slogan

The ESG (Standard 1.3) require student-centred learning, teaching and assessment. It is easy to treat this as a curriculum-design principle. But student-centredness makes a specific, testable claim about feedback: that students are treated as participants in shaping their education, not as data points to be aggregated after the fact.

A conventional end-of-term Likert survey fails this test in a mundane but decisive way. It asks students to rate pre-written statements on a five-point scale, then reduces their experience to a departmental mean. The student is the object of measurement, not a partner in interpretation. The students-as-partners literature is explicit that genuine partnership requires students to help define what is worth asking and to see their input change something. If your evaluation instrument cannot show a student why their answer mattered, it is difficult to argue it embodies student-centred learning in any sense a reviewer would accept.

The social dimension turns non-response into an equity problem

The sharpest implication of Tirana sits in the social dimension. The endorsed indicators push institutions to evidence that under-represented and disadvantaged students are not merely admitted but heard and supported through to completion. That reframes a technical weakness of course evaluation — low and uneven response rates — as a fairness question.

Non-response in student surveys is rarely random. Commuter students, part-time students, carers, first-generation entrants and students who are struggling are systematically less likely to complete a voluntary end-of-term form. When a programme then acts on the resulting average, it is acting on the preferences of the students who were already most engaged — and quietly overwriting the belonging and experience of exactly the groups the social dimension exists to protect. A communiqué that commits to monitoring equity by 2027 makes "our response rate was 38%, so we can only really speak for the satisfied" an increasingly uncomfortable line to write in a self-evaluation report.

Fundamental values include the freedom to give honest feedback

Tirana reaffirmed academic freedom, institutional autonomy and the participation of students and staff in governance as fundamental values, following the Rome Communiqué framework. For evaluation, this cuts two ways. Students need to feel safe giving candid, critical feedback without fear of exposure — which is a confidentiality and data-protection design problem. Staff, in turn, need protection from evaluation data being used crudely as a management instrument. A system that publishes raw scores and lets a bimodal, small-sample distribution stand in for teaching quality is not honouring either value; it is letting a mean hide the disagreement and inviting misuse.

The digital transition is where the real leverage sits

The most forward-looking Tirana priority for our purposes is the digital transition. Ministers were clear-eyed that digitalisation of higher education is not optional. For quality assurance, the honest reading is that the tooling most universities use to hear from students — static forms exported to a spreadsheet — predates the technology now available. If an institution is serious about a digital transition, its student-voice infrastructure is a reasonable place to show it, provided the technology is deployed to deepen the conversation rather than merely to move a paper form online.

"But isn't this just aspirational language?"

The strongest objection is that communiqués are non-binding declarations that change nothing on a Tuesday morning in a faculty office. That is fair as far as it goes — no minister will inspect your survey. But it mistakes how these commitments bite. They bite through the ESG-aligned review cycle, through national QA agencies that cite EHEA priorities in their frameworks, and through the European Approach to joint programmes and emerging European Degree work, where comparable evidence of student experience is explicitly expected. Institutions that treat Tirana as a signal to modernise their evidence base will find the next review easier; those that wait for a directive will be modernising under time pressure instead. Aspirational language sets the direction of travel for the instruments that are enforceable.

A second objection: student-centredness and rigorous measurement pull in opposite directions — the more conversational and participatory you make feedback, the harder it is to benchmark. This is a real tension, not a fatal one. The answer is not to abandon comparability but to separate the two jobs: use structured items for the trend lines a QA office needs, and use open, probing dialogue for the meaning those numbers cannot carry. Triangulating the two is precisely what multiple evidence sources are for.

What Tirana-aligned course evaluation looks like in practice

Concretely, an institution reading Tirana seriously would move on four fronts. It would treat response rate as an equity metric and act when particular cohorts fall silent, rather than reporting a single number. It would give students visible evidence that feedback changed something — closing the loop as a governance habit, not a slogan. It would protect candour through genuine confidentiality and restrained, context-rich reporting. And it would use its digital transition to make feedback a two-way exchange.

This is where an AI-native platform earns its place. Koji for Education runs AI-moderated conversational interviews rather than static forms: every student can be asked a follow-up, so the instrument adapts to the individual instead of imposing one size on all. It combines six structured question types — for the comparable trend lines QA offices still need — with automatic thematic analysis of open-text responses at programme and institution level, so the qualitative voice is not lost to a spreadsheet. Standardised, bias-aware AI moderation removes the inconsistency of human interviewers, and EU-appropriate, GDPR-compliant data handling supports the confidentiality that candid feedback requires. Because the same AI interview engine also powers general user and customer research on the main Koji platform, teaching-and-learning centres and institutional-research teams can share one method across student and stakeholder voice.

Koji does not make an institution Tirana-compliant — no tool does, and there is no compliance stamp to earn. What it does is make it far easier to show student-centredness, monitor the social dimension, and evidence a real digital transition in the one place reviewers reliably look: how you listen to students, and what you do next.

The bottom line

Tirana is a direction, not a deadline. But the direction is unambiguous: European higher education is committing, again, to student-centred learning and to an equitable, digital, values-based system — and course evaluation is where those commitments become concrete or stay rhetorical. The universities that will look strong in the 2027 progress cycle are the ones treating student voice as evidence worth collecting well, not a box worth ticking.

Frequently asked questions

Does the Tirana Communiqué require universities to change their course evaluation?

No. The Bologna Process is soft law — the communiqué sets shared priorities rather than binding rules. But those priorities feed into the ESG-aligned quality assurance reviews that national agencies do enforce, so institutions are expected to show their student-voice practice reflects student-centred learning and the social dimension.

When was the Tirana Communiqué adopted and by whom?

It was adopted on 29–30 May 2024 at the EHEA Ministerial Conference in Tirana, Albania, by ministers responsible for higher education across the 49-member European Higher Education Area, marking 25 years of the Bologna Process.

How does the social dimension relate to course evaluation response rates?

The social dimension commits systems to equity for under-represented students. Because non-response in voluntary surveys is not random — disadvantaged and struggling students respond less — a low response rate is an equity blind spot, not just a statistical nuisance. Monitoring who is missing becomes part of the fairness case.

What is the 2027 milestone?

Ministers committed to a progress report on implementing the Principles and Guidelines to Strengthen the Social Dimension by 2027. It is a checkpoint at which institutions and systems will be expected to evidence progress, including how they hear from and act on the experience of all student groups.

Can conversational AI evaluation still produce comparable data for quality assurance?

Yes, if it is designed to. Combining structured question types for trend lines with AI-moderated open dialogue for depth lets an institution keep the benchmarkable numbers a QA office needs while capturing the individual voice that student-centred learning demands.