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Melinda Roy

Melinda Roy

Melinda has over a decade of professional experience in data analysis and research across higher education, public service, libraries, and healthcare sectors. She has a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Non-Fiction from University of King's College.

Re:University Reflections (Part 1): Change Doesn't Always Start at the Top

Universities are being asked to perform a difficult balancing act: reframe and defend the importance of their work, become more cost-effective, align more closely with labour market and national needs, and navigate rapid change enabled by AI. None of this is easy. Much of it is uncomfortable.

What's Data Governance got to do with it (Power BI)?

While the initial lift of getting data set up for Power BI is going to be time-consuming, you'll get compounding returns as developing new dashboards gets faster. What happens with and without a centralized metadata management tool when an analyst is asked to transfer an existing report to Power BI:

Spring 2026 Newsletter & Upcoming Events

It's approaching the end of the fiscal year

6 Keys to Power BI Success

A good business intelligence design tool makes learning a data

2025 Fall Update

Plaid launches new website and blog subscription options, partners with MortarCAPS, presents at CIRPA, and answers your frequently asked questions about automatically populating a data warehouse from a live data source.

7 Practices Research & Data Analysts Can Learn from DIY-ers

Research and data analysts in higher education, like many public sectors, find themselves doing a lot with a little. Just like tinkerers and DIY-ers you call up about a problem with your sink, analysts are problem-solvers in the student information and processing neighborhoods of their institutions.

6 Steps to Developing a Metric to Understand Course Compaction

Just as strategic enrolment management looks at metrics at the institutional, department, program, and course level, so too should course compaction and curriculum offerings be understood at different levels of aggregation.

Four Ways Course Compaction Benefits Instructors

While instructor FTEs and student contact hours may go up due to course compaction, strategic thinkers understand that class size, classroom amenities, and instructor workloads impact student learning experiences and success.

6 Indicators of Healthy Course Compaction

In the continuation of the series on course compaction for strategic enrolment management, this post discusses what student and course metrics might indicate healthy course compaction.

Course Compaction: Indicators of Negative Compaction

Course compaction can improve student program progression rates by streamlining course offerings, but as with any enrolment management initiative, there must be metrics developed to evaluate its effectiveness.