When UNE gave every student access to enterprise AI last year, someone had to make sure they had the skills and support to use it effectively. That work has earned Shannon Tyrrell, LabNext70's AI Innovation Lead, a nomination for AI Leader of the Year at the 2026 Women in Digital National Awards. This was new territory for the sector. When UNE switched on Madgwick Student in November 2025, it became the first Australian university to put enterprise AI in front of its whole student body - regional, remote, First Nations and first-in-family learners included. Shannon led the adoption strategy behind it.
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Annota is an AI-powered academic writing feedback platform built to replace Studiosity, giving UNE greater control over how students receive formative writing support, where their data is stored and what that feedback is grounded in.
The platform was developed alongside a broader effort across UNE to explore alternatives to the existing service, with a number of teams working on potential solutions.
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Building Indigenous perspectives into curriculum is a specialist academic skill, and one many academics have had little structured support to develop. The work needs to be academically rigorous and grounded in a local context. A new AI assistant built by UNE's Oorala Aboriginal Centre offers a structured way in. It works as a reflective scaffold that guides educators through their own thinking, because the diversity of First Nations knowledge systems and the depth of understanding required for genuine integration mean a generic AI-generated answer would undermine the exercise of indigenising curriculum.
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Students rated every external support option above 90% for helpfulness in the T1 student survey - and their comments show how they used the help on offer. All external support options scored over 90% for helpfulness. The Madgwick Student Information Hub on MyLearn rated highest at 96%, with webinars and workshops, PAM peer mentoring, Mentor sessions and SimTheory Academy all at 93% or 94%.
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Student comments in the T1 survey reinforce the quantitative findings. Three quarters of students agree with using AI tools in education, and more than 86% do not disagree. For online students in particular, the platform signalled an institution keeping pace with change.
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Fifteen Australian universities are beginning work this week on a new AI coalition designed to move the sector from discussion to action. The newly established HEDx AI Innovation Coalition brings universities together around one practical test: each institution will take on a substantive AI project and work it through to a live result by November. AI is already disrupting higher education; the question is whether the next phase will be led by educators, or shaped around them by vendors, platforms and students working outside institutional systems.
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An AI-generated hypothesis only becomes worthy of a real-world experiment by being digitally or experimentally tested and refined in a closed-loop optimisation, many times over. That premise sits at the core of the Institute for Strategic Artificial Intelligence (ISA), working in deep partnership with UNE's LabNext70.
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UNE's Chief AI Officer Aaron Driver and AI Innovation Lead Shannon Tyrrell took Madgwick Studio to the HEDx Conference at UTS Sydney on 17 June. Presenting alongside UTS AI Specialist Jami Emerson and HEDx Director of Innovation and Engagement Annabel Murphy, the session 'Designing the next-generation learning experience' had participants design a lesson in real time - with the strongest concept built on the spot and tested from the student side.
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