Studio goes live at HEDx
UNE's Chief AI Officer Aaron Driver and AI Innovation Lead Shannon Tyrrell will showcase Madgwick Studio at HEDx session, 'Designing the next-generation learning experience', on 17 June. Participants design a learning experience in real time - the best concept gets built into a working lesson and tested from the student perspective.
Meanwhile, Aaron and Executive Director Neil Durant join the HEDx podcast to discuss why UNE's strategic plan centres on human flourishing rather than rankings, how massified education lost its human connection, and why a coalition of universities is forming to lead the change together.
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Inside the new Studio platform
The newest addition to UNE's Madgwick suite, Studio is a platform where students reason, explain and prove what they know as they learn. In a world where polished outputs can be produced without underlying understanding, Studio ensures capability is genuinely earned. Around Studio, the Madgwick ecosystem is growing. Studio is a Learning Experience Engine where students prove capability. Earned Learning is the pedagogy behind it. The Commons adds human community. Unity supports students across their full UNE journey. Living Degrees keep curriculum current. Our explainer covers all five.
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Staff innovation bridges research and industry
The Industry Engagement Discovery Tool, developed by Kyle Mulrooney from the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences faculty with support from LabNext70, addresses a persistent challenge: how do researchers find the right industry partners when they can't always see where their work fits? "There's a lot of really great work going on that could be relevant to industry, but oftentimes I think that gap's a bit difficult to bridge for academics," Kyle explains. "They can't see the pinch points that are out there for various industries."
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Haiku 4.5: fast, accurate tool calling
Anthropic's Claude Haiku 4.5 - now available in Madgwick - delivers breakthrough performance for AI assistants that use tools, with speeds up to twice as fast as larger models. For staff building assistants that integrate external capabilities - whether web search, data analysis, or custom functions - Haiku 4.5 represents a significant upgrade in both reliability and responsiveness.
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Virtual lab speeds solar recycling breakthrough
Researchers at UNE have developed an AI platform that could make solar panel recycling economically viable at scale - by screening millions of potential chemical solutions in a fraction of the time traditional methods would require. The platform addresses a looming crisis: how to recycle the 90,000 tonnes of solar panel waste expected annually in Australia by 2030. To date, effective recycling has remained out of reach due to the complex and expensive chemistry required to recover valuable materials.
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Speedy pro images with Imagen 4
Transform your ideas into stunning visuals in seconds with Google's most advanced image generator - now available through Madgwick's MCP Store. Imagen 4 delivers photorealistic images with crisp text rendering, making it ideal for academic presentations, and educational content.
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Exam queries answered, insights revealed
A new Cogniti assistant is helping UNE's Exams and eAssessment team manage high-volume student inquiries - and uncovering unexpected insights about student needs in the process. The Exams Assistant, developed by Kylie Day (Manager, Exams and eAssessment) and Jeanne Heath (Coordinator, Exams and eAssessment) with technical support from the LabNext70 team, addresses what may sound like a familiar challenge: students calling with routine questions about information that is already easily accessible to them.
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Turn Word into Moodle books
A new AI assistant developed at UNE Partnerships, addresses one of the most time-consuming aspects of creating online learning materials - converting Word documents into clean HTML for Moodle books. The Word to HTML assistant tackles a workflow challenge familiar to many educators: transforming lengthy course documents into properly formatted, web-ready content.
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Simtheory Academy launch: AI skills for all
Through UNE's official training partnership with the Simtheory platform - which provides the underlying technology for Madgwick - the Academy addresses an important institutional responsibility: helping the university community harness AI tools effectively while understanding their limitations and risks. Open to the public, Simtheory Academy offers AI education to a wide audience - from UNE colleagues and prospective students to community members seeking to build practical skills and use AI tools safely.
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UNE leads on Indigenous rights in AI
As artificial intelligence reshapes university education, the University of New England is addressing an important question: how can institutions ensure AI development respects Indigenous rights rather than perpetuating existing patterns of knowledge extraction?
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PASS leaders to guide peers’ AI adoption
A strategic partnership between LabNext70 and Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS@UNE) is helping UNE students access peer-led support to build confidence in adopting AI tools like Madgwick Student. Through mentor-led workshops and one-on-one training sessions, PASS@UNE is playing a pivotal role in the Madgwick Student rollout - leveraging its established student-to-student network to foster safe and effective AI adoption across the student body.
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Madgwick AI cafe
Madgwick help, no fuss. Wednesdays from 9 - 10am.
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Madgwick Student: Safety, privacy, equity and job readiness at scale
When 85-90% of university students are already using AI tools,1 providing secure, equitable access becomes an institutional responsibility. Madgwick Student, launching November 1, addresses this need through a custom platform that prioritises student protection while building essential workforce skills.
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Visualising spreadsheet data
Converting spreadsheet data into professional charts shouldn't require hours of Excel wrangling. The Data Visualisation Assistant, conceived by Digital Marketing Coordinator Robert Hughes and developed by LabNext70's Prompt Engineer Tom Miles, bridges this gap - transforming raw data into shareable visualisations through a guided four-step process.
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Manage your workload with Task Planner MCP
Bring seamless task management directly into your AI conversations on Madgwick with the Task Planner MCP. Rather than switching between tabs or losing track of action items buried in chat history, you can create, organise, and update tasks a central project hub - without ever leaving your conversation.
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Create AI podcasts with Madgwick
Transform your Madgwick chats and research into professional-sounding podcasts in minutes using the new Podcast Maker MCP tool. You can quickly generate a podcast from your chats to create an engaging audio summary for students, or audio content you can consume on the go.
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Build AI learning experiences with Cogniti Assist
UNE educators can now transform teaching ideas into functional AI learning tools without any technical expertise. The new Cogniti Assist tool guides you through creating custom AI agents for student learning - no coding or AI experience required.
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Transform images with Nano Banana
Madgwick’s new Nano Banana (aka Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) MCP brings powerful new image editing capabilities to your fingertips. Unlike traditional AI image generators, Nano Banana excels at editing and combining existing images, rather than creating new ones from scratch.
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Madgwick update: MCPs connect AI to tools
The MCP Store serves as your central hub for discovering and installing these capabilities. Currently in trial phase, the store is being populated gradually to ensure stability and proper testing.
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What model fits best? Try the Model Catalogue
The new Model Catalogue in Madgwick takes the guesswork out of selecting AI models by showing which models excel at specific tasks, their technical capabilities, and compatibility with MCPs.
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