Course Evaluation Evidence for Western Balkans Accreditation: Serbia (NEAQA), Albania (ASCAL), North Macedonia (AQHE), Montenegro (ACQAHE), Bosnia (HEA) & Kosovo (KAA)

Short answer: Every national quality-assurance agency in the Western Balkans — Serbia's NEAQA, Albania's ASCAL, North Macedonia's AQHE, Montenegro's ACQAHE, Bosnia and Herzegovina's HEA, and Kosovo's KAA — builds its accreditation and external-evaluation procedures on the European Standards and Guidelines (ESG 2015). The ESG make student feedback a first-class requirement: institutions must collect it, act on it, and show they closed the loop. This guide maps those requirements to concrete course-evaluation outputs, and shows how a modern, AI-native tool like Koji produces the standardized, longitudinal, action-tracked evidence that Western Balkans reviewers expect during accreditation and re-accreditation.

The one framework behind six agencies

The Western Balkans is not a patchwork of unrelated rules. All six systems are part of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), and all have aligned — or are aligning — their external quality-assurance procedures with the ESG 2015, the same standards used across the EU. Most of the agencies are affiliates or members of ENQA and of CEENQA (the Central and Eastern European Network of Quality Assurance Agencies), and several are working towards or have achieved recognition on the wider European register. For an institution, that means the evidence an accreditor asks for is broadly the same across the region, even though the agency names, cycles and languages differ.

Country	Agency (abbreviation)	Basis
Serbia	National Entity for Accreditation and Quality Assurance in Higher Education (NEAQA)	ESG 2015; body: Commission for Accreditation and Quality Assurance (CAQA)
Albania	Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ASCAL)	ESG 2015; sole national QA body
North Macedonia	Agency for Quality in Higher Education (AQHE)	ESG 2015; successor to HEAEB; Accreditation Board + Evaluation Board
Montenegro	Agency for Control and Quality Assurance of Higher Education (ACQAHE)	ESG 2015; ENQA affiliate, CEENQA member
Bosnia & Herzegovina	Agency for Development of Higher Education and Quality Assurance (HEA)	ESG 2015; state-level agency, ENQA affiliate
Kosovo	Kosovo Accreditation Agency (KAA)	ESG 2015; EQAR-registered, ENQA affiliate

Agency structures and cycles change; verify the current standard, procedure and self-evaluation template on your national agency's website before compiling a submission.

What the ESG actually require of student feedback

Three ESG Part 1 standards do most of the work in an accreditation submission, and each one is really a question about your course-evaluation evidence.

• Standard 1.3 — Student-centred learning, teaching and assessment. Reviewers want proof that teaching responds to student needs. Course evaluation is the most direct evidence that you listen to students and adapt — but only if the feedback is specific enough to act on, and only if you can show what you changed.
• Standard 1.7 — Information management. Institutions must collect, analyse and use information to manage their programmes. Reviewers look for systematic data, not one-off surveys: consistent instruments, comparable results across cohorts, and analysis that feeds decisions.
• Standard 1.9 — Ongoing monitoring and periodic review. Programmes must be monitored continuously and reviewed periodically, with student feedback as a named input. This is where "closing the loop" lives: the agency wants to see feedback then decision then action then re-evaluation, documented over time.

A raw stack of Likert averages does not satisfy any of these well. Reviewers can read a "4.1 overall" as easily as you can, and it tells them almost nothing about what students needed or what you did. What satisfies the standards is interpretable, longitudinal, action-linked evidence.

Mapping accreditation requirements to Koji outputs

The table below turns the ESG expectations that NEAQA, ASCAL, AQHE, ACQAHE, HEA and KAA all apply into the concrete course-evaluation outputs a review panel can actually read.

Accreditation requirement (ESG-aligned)	What reviewers want to see	Koji output that provides it
Student-centred learning (1.3)	Evidence that teaching adapts to student needs	Thematic analysis of AI-moderated interviews, with representative student quotes as evidence
Systematic information management (1.7)	Consistent, comparable instruments across cohorts	Standardized, bias-aware moderation applied identically to every course and cohort
Ongoing monitoring (1.9)	Feedback tracked over multiple cycles	Longitudinal cohort reporting showing trends across semesters and years
Closing the loop (1.3, 1.9)	Documented action taken in response to feedback	Built-in action tracking: each theme linked to a decision, an action, and a follow-up
Data protection / confidentiality	GDPR-aligned handling; student anonymity	EU processing under GDPR, with anonymity controls for small classes
Self-evaluation report evidence	Ready-to-cite analysis, not raw exports	Report-ready thematic summaries and trend charts suitable for the SER

Because every Western Balkans agency draws on the same ESG spine, one well-designed evaluation programme produces evidence you can submit — with minor formatting changes — to NEAQA in Serbia, ASCAL in Albania, AQHE in North Macedonia, ACQAHE in Montenegro, HEA in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or KAA in Kosovo.

Why conversational evaluation fits the region's needs

Two features of the Western Balkans landscape make AI-moderated interviews especially useful. First, multilingualism: programmes run in national languages and, increasingly, in English, and cohorts include regional and international students. A conversational interviewer that probes in the student's language collects richer answers than a fixed translated form — and reduces the reference-bias problem where "I learned a lot" means different things to different students. Second, comparability across a re-accreditation cycle: agencies want to see improvement over time, which requires instruments that stay standardized while still capturing qualitative depth. Static surveys force a choice between comparability (fixed Likert items) and depth (free-text that is hard to aggregate). Koji's standardized moderation keeps the instrument constant while the AI probing supplies the depth — so year-on-year comparison and rich qualitative evidence are no longer in tension.

The same AI interview engine underpins the main Koji research platform at koji.so, where organisations use it for customer and user research; the education product applies that engine to students, courses and programmes.

Where a traditional approach may still fit

Honesty matters with an evidence-driven audience, so two caveats. If your institution is small, runs a handful of programmes, and already has a mature, well-documented paper-or-form process that your agency has repeatedly accepted, the marginal gain from switching tools mid-cycle may be modest — plan the transition between review cycles, not during one. And if your national agency mandates a specific national survey instrument (some systems prescribe items or a central platform), you should map any new tool onto that requirement rather than replacing it; the right move there is to run conversational evaluation alongside the mandated instrument to add the qualitative depth the mandated form lacks. Koji is designed to complement, not fight, an agency-prescribed dataset.

Building an accreditation-ready evidence base

A practical sequence that works across all six systems:

1. Standardize the instrument once, so every course and cohort is evaluated the same way — this is what makes Standard 1.7 defensible.
2. Collect conversationally each term, so the evidence carries the "why," not just a score.
3. Analyse thematically and keep the representative quotes — panels trust evidence they can read.
4. Track the action against each theme, so Standard 1.9's closing-the-loop expectation is documented as it happens, not reconstructed the week before a site visit.
5. Report longitudinally across cycles, so re-accreditation shows a trajectory of improvement rather than a snapshot.

Do this consistently and the self-evaluation report almost writes itself: you can cite thematic summaries, trend charts and an action log instead of exporting raw averages and hoping the panel infers the story.

Related Resources

• Course Evaluation Evidence for South-East European Accreditation: Croatia (AZVO), Slovenia (NAKVIS/SQAA), Bulgaria (NEAA) & Cyprus (CYQAA)
• Course Evaluation Evidence for Central European Accreditation: Czech NAU, Hungarian MAB & Slovak SAAVS
• Turning Student Feedback into ESG / ENQA Accreditation Evidence
• The Self-Evaluation Report (SER): Turning Course Evaluation Evidence into Accreditation-Ready Documentation
• Programme Review & Revalidation: Turning Course Evaluation into Accreditation Evidence

FAQ

Do Western Balkans agencies really use the same standards as EU accreditors? Broadly, yes. Serbia's NEAQA, Albania's ASCAL, North Macedonia's AQHE, Montenegro's ACQAHE, Bosnia and Herzegovina's HEA and Kosovo's KAA all build their procedures on the ESG 2015, the same European Standards and Guidelines used across the EHEA. Cycles, languages and templates differ, but the underlying evidence expectations for student feedback are highly aligned.

Which ESG standards does course evaluation evidence support? Primarily Standard 1.3 (student-centred learning), Standard 1.7 (information management) and Standard 1.9 (ongoing monitoring and periodic review). Together they require that you collect student feedback systematically, act on it, and document the loop over time.

Our national agency mandates a specific survey. Can we still use Koji? Yes — run Koji alongside the mandated instrument. The prescribed survey satisfies the formal requirement; Koji's conversational interviews add the qualitative depth and closing-the-loop action tracking that a fixed form cannot provide. Map, do not replace.

Is conversational, AI-moderated evaluation GDPR-compliant for the region? Koji processes data under GDPR in the EU with anonymity controls suited to small classes. Most Western Balkans systems apply GDPR-aligned data-protection expectations; confirm your institution's DPIA and retention settings as part of onboarding.

What single output most impresses a review panel? A documented action trail: each recurring theme linked to a decision, an action taken, and evidence it was reviewed the following cycle. That is the "closing the loop" narrative Standard 1.9 asks for, and it is the hardest thing to fake retrospectively — which is exactly why it is persuasive.

Ready to build accreditation-ready evidence? See how Koji standardizes collection, analyses feedback thematically, and tracks action across cycles for NEAQA, ASCAL, AQHE, ACQAHE, HEA and KAA submissions. Explore Koji for Education.