From the Vice President
Two of the things on everyone’s mind at the moment is, who are the new committee members, and what’s happening with the forum this year! Our Vice President sheds some light on both this month.
Executive Committee Movements
This month we welcomed 3 AAIR members onto the Executive Committee. One was to fill an existing vacancy, while 2 additional members were co-opted as observers to assist with the ongoing long-term development of the committee membership.
The new committee member and co-opted members will serve until the next election at the end of 2024.
I’d like to welcome:
- Cassie Saunders, Lecturer, Learning and Teaching at the University of Tasmania.
- Anand Kulkarni, consultant, and Head of Research at the Centre for Optimism.
- Sharon Liddell, Surveys Coordinator at the University of Technology Sydney.
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AAIR Forum 2023
We are very excited to be able to confirm the dates for the 2023 AAIR Forum, which will be held from Wednesday 29 November to Friday 1 December 2023 at the Oaks Melbourne on Market. We look forward to welcoming delegates from Australia, New Zealand, and countries further afar. The theme this year is, ‘Life ACCORDing to AAIR’. While there is a particular Australian flavour to this year’s theme, there will also be plenty of talks relating to the New Zealand context in tertiary education, as they have experienced their own changes this year.
Our subthemes this year are:
- The evolving role of the institutional researcher
- Justifying the value of higher education and research
- Evidence-based strategic planning (and implementation)
- Benchmarking for continuous quality improvement
- Informing learning and teaching through evaluation and surveys
- Realising benefits – the role of institutional research in enterprise and transformation projects
- Compliance and Government reporting reform
- Business intelligence, analytics, visualisation and modelling – the foundations of IR
Given the well-attended Forum in Sydney last year, we have moved back to the traditional in-person attendance for this year’s Forum. While we understand that not everyone may have the budget to attend in person, we believe offering the Forum with this format gives the best opportunity to get the most out of the experience and all the networking opportunities should you be able to attend. Of course, as in previous years, online presentations will be facilitated for those still wanting to present but are unable to present in person.
The logistics of offering in-person and online attendance under the hybrid model simply adds too much to the cost of the Forum budget. Therefore, we encourage abstract submissions from across our AAIR membership and from those who may be thinking of becoming members.
Presentations could be about how you or your institution might be leading the way in a specific area, how you do things at your institution that you would like to share with others, or simply a session raising more questions than answers. The AAIR family is very collegial and always willing to provide support and encouragement to new and existing presenters. There will be the usual Best Presenter and Best New Presenter awards on offer too, with the Best Presenter possibly being given the opportunity to present at the 2024 AIR Forum in the United States.
On the day before the Forum officially starts we will host Special Interest Group (SIG) sessions. These SIG sessions are optional to attend at no additional cost to delegates who have registered for the full delegate package.
We hope that you will be able to attend the AAIR Forum this year, and look forward to catching up with regular AAIRies, and meeting our newbies.
Don Johnston
Vice President, AAIR
