A keynote "The role of institutional research in positioning higher education institutions - practices in CEE countries”, at the 37th Annual Forum of the European Higher Education Society - Linking research, policy and practice (EAIR)

July 22, 2015

Coming up: a keynote "The role of institutional research in positioning higher education institutions - practices in CEE countries”, at the 37th Annual Forum of the European Higher Education Society - Linking research, policy and practice (EAIR) (the Danube University of Krems, Austria, August 30th – September 3rd, 2015) http://www.eairweb.org/forum2015/

Higher education institutions in Central and Eastern Europe are caught between enforced data reporting (because the governments want them to account for their activities and performance) and institutional research for strategic development (because higher education institutions want to do better) and strategic positioning (because higher education institutions want to perform better than others). Since the capacity for institutional research is in most higher education institutions still fairly limited (there are a few institutional researchers employed and these tend to work with centralized, yet non-integrated information systems), the emphasis of institutional research tends to be more on formal reporting than on supporting decision-making. This keynote will explore the tensions between the institutional research practices influenced by state steering and institutional research practices needed for strategic development and positioning of higher education institutions.