EAIR (The European Higher Education Society) is this year holding their 34th Annual Forum 5th to 8th of September in Stavanger, Norway. The event will be hosted by University of Stavanger and it has a title “The Social Contract of Higher Education”. If you are an early career higher education researcher (research career under 10 years), you now have an additional reason to go to Stavanger in September – ECHER is holding its first cooperative event on Wednesday 5 September 2012, time 12:45 – 15:15 with a workshop titled “Introduction to Doing Institutional Research: Young Researchers and the Practice of Institutional Research“.
The workshop is hosted by Dawn Geronimo Terkla (Associate Provost, Office of Institutional Research & Planning, Tufts University, USA), Peter Hoekstra (Director of Institutional Research, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands), and Rachel Sweetman and Christian Schneijderberg from ECHER. The workshop combines an interactive introduction in institutional research and a meeting of early career researchers in the field of HE. Topics listed on the event webpage include:
- sources of IR, such as the enormous mountains of administrative data, often not been used for research. As Mantz Yorke once wrote: There’s gold in them there hills!
- techniques of unpacking these databases. How to get them, how to use them.
- relation to senior HE-management, the sense of timing to have impact
- ways to present information outside the research arena: bulletins, fact files illustrated with graphs.
You can find more information about the registration to the EAIR Forum and deadlines here and on the overall event here.