Forrester lands ANZ higher-ed AI research at TechnologyOne Melbourne

Digital Attitudes, 28 July 2026

Term 3 Week 3, Tuesday morning. The Australian higher-ed AI conversation is being publicly set on stage this week, not in vendor blog posts.

Forrester's ANZ higher-ed AI research drops at TechnologyOne Melbourne this morning

TechnologyOne EDU User Group Melbourne opens day 2 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre this morning with a specific 8:30 to 8:50 AM session, "The State of AI in Higher Education in ANZ: From Aspiration to Impact", built on exclusive new Forrester research covering AI adoption across the ANZ higher-ed sector (EDU User Group Melbourne 27 to 28 July 2026, TechnologyOne). The 8:50 to 9:10 AM follow-on, "Responsible AI for Higher Education", is delivered by TechnologyOne product owner Harry Ryan and business development manager Cameron Shea and covers data security, ethical AI, and what responsible deployment looks like inside a tertiary institution. James Cook University then takes the customer spotlight to describe a decade of running OneEducation. Yesterday's day 1 opened with Academic in Residence Professor Martin Bean CBE on six defining education and labour market trends including skills-based hiring and AI adoption.

Why this matters: TechnologyOne's OneEducation platform mobilises roughly 60 per cent of higher education in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, so its own user group is where the sector's AI arithmetic is publicly set, not the vendor's marketing site. The Forrester research is the piece to watch, because it puts a number on the "adoption gap" question every ANZ deputy vice-chancellor is asked in senate this term (how many of our AI investments have converted to a measurable student, retention or operations outcome), and the answer is about to be quoted in council papers this week. Two practical asks for an Australian CIO or PVC Education watching from the office this morning: read the Forrester slide deck before it becomes the citation everyone else uses, and get the Ryan and Shea talk transcript for the vendor register, because "data security and ethical AI" is the wording that finance committees now read line by line.

Kortext now bills Aussie unis in AUD and pushes IQ Quizzes into Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard and D2L

Kortext's July 2026 platform update, published on the Kortext blog last week, adds native AUD support to Kortext Acquire alongside USD and EUR, adds student-level engagement reporting to Kortext Teach, and restores multi-select filtering across the analytics dashboards (July 2026 updates, Kortext). The bigger shift is inside Kortext IQ, the higher-ed AI assistant: a new Quizzes feature that lets students generate personalised quizzes from AI-assigned books and their own files with instant feedback linked back to source materials, expanded data sources that pull in VLE pages, lecturer files and institution-approved URLs, D2L and Blackboard added to the supported VLE list (Canvas and Moodle already there), and a new Canvas floating action button that opens Kortext IQ inside Canvas without leaving the page. Kortext signed the University of Tasmania as its first Australian stream partner in May, so the AUD change is the piece that actually matters for procurement here.

Why this matters: Australian universities buying Kortext content this term have been paying in USD or GBP and wearing the currency spread on every renewal. Native AUD support is a small operational unlock that also removes the FX line every finance office has been asking Kortext for since UTAS signed. On the IQ Quizzes side, the concrete Term 3 question for a director of learning technologies is whether the Canvas floating action button gets turned on at the tenant level or per unit, because the moment it goes live a student can generate a quiz from any assigned reading in one click, and the academic integrity officer will want to know before students discover it, not after. The D2L and Blackboard support broadens the story past a Canvas conversation, which matters for the Griffith, JCU and Charles Sturt tenants where Kortext is already on the roadmap.

Two of three big LMS vendors are lining up ANZ AI reveals inside four weeks

InstructureCon 2026 closed Thursday 23 July in Louisville with the Foundry and Project Athena announcements as the standing agenda item (InstructureCon 2026, Instructure via PR Newswire), TechnologyOne EDU User Group runs today and tomorrow at MCEC, and CanvasCon ANZ opens in Sydney on Monday 24 and Tuesday 25 August, with the Instructure ANZ team billing it as the year's practical-insights forum for local Canvas customers (CanvasCon ANZ 2026 save the date, Instructure). Three of the biggest AI product decisions the Australian higher-ed sector will make this Semester 2 land in that four-week window.

Why this matters: A CIO looking at Term 3 budget submissions has, by design, three vendor-hosted forums back to back where the AI roadmap conversation happens with peers in a room. That is unusual, and the operational read for procurement is that this is when the sector benchmarks itself before September pricing lands. If your institution runs on Canvas and OneEducation both, the Instructure ANZ product roadmap for Canvas plus IgniteAI will be the last one to arrive (24 August), which puts the CanvasCon ANZ session directly against the 30 September IgniteAI freemium cutoff we flagged on Sunday. Line the two calendars up on one page before you walk into the next capex meeting.

Term 3 briefings and dashboards, quietly linked at digitalattitudes.com.au.