Exploring the CAUDIT Top Ten: How Anthology supports insitutions' major technology challenges
The Council of Australasian University Directors of Information Technology (CAUDIT) has released its Top Ten Report for 2025 and—unlike the chart toppers in Triple J’s recent Hottest 100 Australian songs of all time—the results were right on the money.
In its own words, CAUDIT’s Top Ten Report “captures the most significant technology-related topics engaging ICT leaders across Australasia’s universities and research institutions.” It sorts the trends into three key themes—Delivering Empowered Experiences, Leading Through Complexity, and Strengthening Foundations—which distill the biggest challenges facing IT leaders today. Let’s take a look at each, and briefly note some key Anthology initiatives to assist institutions in these areas.
Delivering Empowered Experiences
Trends: Emerging Technologies and AI (#1), Holistic Student Experience (#3), Secure Digital Environment (#4), Identity and Access Management (#9).
It will likely not surprise the reader to learn that the topic of AI featured in this year’s top spot. As CAUDIT explains, “artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping higher education and research across every function,” and it has dominated industry conversations in recent times as a result.
Anthology has been leading the market in developing native AI tools that are tailored to education. This is headlined by our LMS, Blackboard®, which has been first to market with generative AI features that deliver empowered experiences for instructors and students alike. The AI Design Assistant provides suggestions to faculty to inspire course, assessment, and rubric creation, with 96% of instructors agreeing that these capabilities save them time. Blackboard’s AI Conversation, meanwhile, provides an engaging task where the learner can build practical skills via interaction with a tailored AI persona. All of these capabilities have been produced in line with Anthology’s Trustworthy AI Framework, providing institutions with confidence that the application of AI is responsible.
We agree with CAUDIT on the importance of “applying digital technologies to support the student journey to enhance engagement, well-being and success”, and thus believe that EdTech must enable a holistic student experience. In addition to the core functionality of the Blackboard LMS, we extend a raft of connected capabilities that streamline the learner lifecycle, including Anthology® Ally for accessibility, Anthology® Milestone for badging and micro credentials, and the Anthology® Reach CRM. This provides the breadth of expertise required to understand modern learners and support major institutional objectives.
“The innovation and the fullness of the student experience that we're seeing from the technology that's coming out of Anthology really aligns with our guidelines and our strategic approach to technology.”
—Alyce-Maree MacGillivray, Associate Director, University of Western Australia
Leading Through Complexity
Trends: Cyber Strategy (#2), Digital Strategy (#5), The CIO Challenge (#10)
As CAUDIT outlines, IT in higher ed is no longer merely a support function, and the CIO has a much larger role in driving institutional strategy. This represents a range of opportunities—including digitizing the learning experience, as touched on above—but places CIOs in a high-pressure environment where they must “balance innovation with governance, strategy with expectation, risk with opportunity, and long-term vision with immediate operational demands.”
We’re committed to helping IT leaders manage this complex environment—and, here again, the ethical challenge posed by AI is an essential component. In late 2024, we embarked on our Ethical AI in Action World Tour, which included stops in Perth, Sydney, and Brisbane. These events brought together leaders from IT, pedagogy, and EdTech to discuss the core components of responsible AI adoption, leaving attendees with key building blocks to establish policies at their institutions. Insights from the tour have been captured in this paper, including data on the current attitudes towards AI and success stories from across the globe.
While we agree with CAUDIT that recent years have placed increased strain on CIOs, we would expand on this to note that the same is true across their teams, also. With IT now a more fundamental part of higher ed institutions, teams are being asked to cover a wider range of initiatives—generally without additional resources to do so. For this reason, we partner with a number of leading institutions to provide Help Desk support, wherein we take care of lower tier inquiries, freeing up internal staff to focus on strategic initiatives. We’ve recently partnered with AWS Connect, allowing the addition of AI support and even faster responses to learners.
Strengthening Foundations:
Trends: Data Empowered Institutions (#6), Data Governance (#7), Supportable, Sustainable, and Affordable (#8)
Developing a digital strategy is one thing, but executing on it is quite another. A core part of doing so, CAUDIT explains, is “applying analytical techniques and tools to derive key insights to drive informed decision-making and operational efficiency across the organisation.”
To complement our portfolio of solutions, Anthology provides the Illuminate platform to allow institutions to combine data from various sources and make informed decisions. Available at no extra charge to institutions using Blackboard or Reach, Anthology® Illuminate takes out the time and hassle of collecting and curating data, allowing institutional leaders to focus on how it should be applied to improve the learner experience.
Further, we are expanding capabilities to integrate actionable data between technologies. For example, LMS data from Blackboard can now be directly accessed by advisors using Reach, meaning they have crucial academic insights at hand when planning outreach to students. By understanding which learners aren’t engaged with their classes, institutions can provide additional support and nurture them through to completion of their degree.
Finally, an important message through all three key themes in CAUDIT’s Top Ten Report is the need for data security—another area which the rise of AI has thrown under the microscope. “A comprehensive governance framework and well-prepared data assets ensure AI tools can be deployed safely to deliver reliable insights and measurable value,” the report notes.
Our partnership with AWS ensures that Blackboard adheres to high levels of data security, sufficient for us to provide a learning environment not just for higher ed but also government departments and other organisations with stringent data regulations. Where we have brought generative AI tools to market, as we outlined in the “Developing Empowered Experiences” section, this is done in collaboration with credible partners such as Microsoft and AWS Bedrock, and operate as a “closed loop”—meaning no user data is shared back with these providers to further train their models.
Interested in learning more? Discover how Anthology empowers higher education to meet the Australian Universities Accord.