2. Briefly, how would you describe your role in terms of your place in your institution?

I’ve been asked to act as an internal consulting service whose purpose is to extract strategic value from our data assets using advanced analytical techniques, including but not limited to, machine learning, statistical learning, text mining and analysis, visualisation, data mining, predictive and prescriptive analytics, optimisation, simulation and basic statistics. One of our core activities is predicting student retention.

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

• Extracting value from qualitative information i.e. text mining.
• Self-serve data supply and analytics platforms to achieve this.
• Data lake sandbox to augment traditional databases.
• Improving employment outcomes for students.
• Determining best action for improving retention outcomes.
• Load planning and application offer optimisation.