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

• International comparative analysis. In recent years, I’ve been involved in some collaborations which have given me a global perspective on IR practice. Higher education is now a global commodity, and yet our IR practice in each country tends to remain fairly independent. I think we should start approaching our IR from a collaborative multi-national perspective. Sure, our education systems may be different but there is much commonality in our contexts and missions. There is also an opportunity for IR practitioners to collaborate globally to offer alternative approaches to those adopted by university rankings and ratings agencies for comparing performance at institutional and national levels.
• Developing alternative mechanisms for gathering regular student feedback before survey fatigue, social media and micro-credentials kill off the beloved survey!
• Developing predictive models which link together institutional planning in all its flavours: e.g. load planning, curriculum planning, workforce planning, space planning, revenue planning.