1. What is your job title?

Survey Administrator.

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

I work within the Office of Business Intelligence and Performance (BIP) at Western Sydney University. I run the university’s ‘student feedback on units and teaching’ surveys, which serve to evaluate every unit and teacher across 27 teaching sessions throughout the year. My role, along with my colleagues in BIP, is essentially to collect and report on business-critical data to keep the university operating, and to ensure we are supporting teaching staff to provide the best possible learning experience for our students.

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

I believe that truly effective text analysis is still only just emerging in most institutions. Text comments are a really rich data source that survey respondents expend a lot of cognitive energy to provide, yet are largely underutilised because they are complicated to report or visualise at scale. A focus in this area could provide very impactful information for institutions to understand what their students need and to drive decision making within the university.