Head and shoulders photo of Eva Seidel wearing a black business suit.

From the President

Hello to our fellow members of the Australasian Association for Institutional Research.

I am very pleased to introduce to you our first newsletter for 2025 and hope that it provides you with some entertaining and useful information.

Photo of Eva Seidel taking a selfie in a conference room. There are many people at tables in the background of the photo.

As the incoming president of the Association, I wish to thank Stuart Terry for the fantastic support he has provided to the community, and especially for his leadership throughout the pandemic, during times we were unable to meet in person. Thanks to his leadership, we have come out a stronger and larger community, with a dedicated Executive Committee that I am grateful for. Thanks to Stuart, Don Johnston, Lizzie Li, Liesha Northover, Cassandra Saunders, Lisa Bolton, David Cawthorne, Anand Kulkarni, Pallavi Khanna and Sharon Liddell for your support and enthusiasm in helping our association thrive.

I want to take this opportunity to celebrate our achievements in 2024.

Online events

Knowing that not all members are able to attend the annual forum, the Committee has made a commitment to continue our online events, as they provide opportunities for members within our association to connect in an alternative way.

Last year, we held several great events that saw a variety of members join, meet each other, and come together to talk about common issues and solutions. A personal highlight for me was the academic research institutional analytics online events, as we had a wide range of participants, and we covered a lot of ground in our conversations. We know these sessions are valuable and intend to keep them going in 2025.

A massive thank you goes out to Andrew Bradshaw, who has been putting together fantastic newsletters for us over the past 2 years. Andrew has now stepped down to give himself time to enjoy his retirement. Andrew’s dedication to the community and for keeping us informed have been most highly valued and appreciated. Thank you, Andrew!

In Andrew’s place, I’m pleased to share that Alexander Civil is joining us as the new AAIR Newsletter Editor. Alexander comes with some creative ideas that we are super excited to share with you. Thanks Alexander, and welcome aboard!

AAIR Annual Forum in Adelaide

For the first time in my 14-year career in institutional research in higher education, we held the AAIR Annual Forum in my hometown of Adelaide, and I was pleased that mother nature turned it on for us! I was grateful to have many of you come and see our new Flinders University City Campus, to visit the National Wine Centre, and to meet many new faces in the community.

We talked about the Australian Universities Accord … A LOT. We shared what we are and aren’t doing, how we’re going about it, and we learned a bit about the university merger underway in Adelaide. I was pleased this year to see that there was a lot of great conversation during the presentations, and opportunities for the community to connect.

For those who joined us, you might recall the photo we took from one of the sessions. Geez that was a bit of fun! From the feedback we received, we took note of the popularity of running interactive sessions and will encourage this more in future forums. All in all, it felt like everyone had a great time, and for that, I’m grateful. Thank you everyone for helping make it a great event!

AAIR capabilities

Moving forward, our Executive Committee is focussing on building our capabilities and providing our members a community to lean on. We are kicking off the year with goals to develop expertise in areas of business intelligence, surveys and evaluation, institutional research, and planning and load management. We have introduced—and might further evolve—the introduction of an annual forum stream to build influential thought leadership in the community. We are committed to providing our community with multiple opportunities a year to join conversations that progress each core capability. And we want to provide you, our community, mechanisms for members to connect on discussions throughout the year. We are super passionate about our community and welcome your inputs and contributions to helping take good care of it.

We hope you enjoy this fresh newsletter template, and we look forward to seeing you throughout the year!

Thank you

Read the February 2025 AAIR newsletter Right Here, Right Now!

February 2025 Newsletter