AAIR President, Stuart Terry opened day 2 with an acknowledgement of country and a welcome address. Following this was an insightful discussion among our panellists, Angel Calderon (Director, Strategic Insights, RMIT University), Gwilym Croucher (Associate Professor in Higher Education Policy and Management, University of Melbourne), and Andrew Herd (Director, Australian Department of Education). Topics ranged from funding, performance targets, the sustainability of both the universities and the sector, and how we can achieve long-term security and prosperity across the sector.

We saw both veteran presenters and new presenters raise hot topics, as they discussed the projects they have created. Projects ranged from ‘assessing course viability through multi-dimensional analysis using ACEDE’ and ‘application of machine learning in institutional analytics’, to ‘QILT data linkage’. These fantastic presentations shed light on some innovative ways to increase the capacity of the data and show how the data can be used by the broader university community to inform strategic decision making.

As is the tradition, the second day ended with the Forum dinner held at Treviso in the heart of Melbourne. The Forum dinner was sponsored by the lovely Social Research Centre (Thank you!).

This keynote session was followed by a presentation from our second platinum sponsor, Altis, who shared, ‘Reading off the same script with standardised reporting’. Altis shared some key focus areas for organisations to consider when taking the next step to transform their data and analytics programs.

For the remainder of the final day, AI took over one of the conference rooms, with RMIT, SCU, and Altis Consulting, showcasing their works on machine learning applications, including visualisations and regular reporting practices. Simultaneously, the other conference room was occupied by team institutional performance – World University Rankings, cohort completions, KPIs frameworks, you name it, it was discussed!