3. From your perspective, what are the emerging areas of interest in institutional research?

The ambitious QILT project. Many of us are still getting to grips with the nature of the instruments and data. In the employability space, methodological issues still require addressing. More broadly, there are clear signs that people are looking at the value proposition of HE qualifications. QILT is attempting to deal with concepts of underemployment and job relevance. But while this value proposition aspect of HE is being pushed, I wonder if the focus on employment KPIs might be at the expense of other, less tangible benefits of a well-educated population. I think there’s a concern that much institutional research in the student experience/outcomes space is primarily feeding the marketing beast and reinforcing institutional competition and individual economic imperatives, rather than broader social goals.

4. What do you believe will be the future priorities for institutional research?

In terms of student experience, as the continuous monitoring and benchmarking imperative cranks up, the demands on students to be providing regular feedback are increasing. One of the concerns with this is that we may end up relying on more shallow feedback, collected more regularly.

With increasing demands on students to be supplying feedback, perhaps the way to reduce burden is to shorten questionnaires. The logical extension is a single like/dislike button. And with attempts to reduce the time/effort involved, response rates may improve at the expense of quality of response. For example, a decline in the proportion of students who actually provide comments when surveyed about their units/teachers.

So perhaps a future priority should be to guard against a dashboard-driven oversimplification of evaluating student experience.

5. Complete this statement: In my role, I can’t operate effectively without…

The AAIR Newsletter, of course. And the occasional good old moan to other survey managers in the sector – and my team who do all the work.