1. What is your job title?

Associate Director (Performance and Institutional Research) at ANU.

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

The teams I manage handle end-to-end data involving students, and managing data for university rankings. The student data we work with ranges from census-level surveying down to small interview and focus group studies. We also help staff across ANU design and deploy student and staff quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods data collections, and handle the approval processes for one-off student surveys. Managing data for university rankings means working with all the different areas of the university to pull together submissions, and then helping people make sense of what comes back.

3. From your perspective, what will be the key skills, capabilities, and knowledge required for institutional research moving forward?

The next big thing for institutional research is getting back to the future! The focus on collecting data needs to be balanced with understanding that data. What I mean by this is getting beyond dashboards and data visualisations and back to helping people understand the stories data tell. This also means getting beyond pie charts and percentages and rediscovering how to communicate multivariate statistics in ways that help clients.

I am also hopeful that there will be a rediscovery of the rich power of qualitative data. All the time we are saving by automating the collection process can be usefully reinvested into understanding comments.