The University of New England (UNE) will offer all students an AI platform from next month that they can use to build AI assistants as study aids and get to grips with the technology.
The Madgwick platform, named after the university’s first vice-chancellor, is built on technology by a Newcastle, NSW startup, Simtheory.
It acts as an “integrated AI workspace where students can build their own team of AI assistants tailored to their specific study habits,” the university said in a statement.
“These assistants bring search, planning, coding, and research capabilities into a single unified environment.”
The intent is not only to help students directly, but also to assist them to develop AI skills that would be applicable in any workplace they go on to join.
Providing the platform to students for free also ensured equitable access to the technology, vice-chancellor professor Chris Moran said.
“With AI permeating the workforce, it will very soon be considered essential for universities to provide AI for their students,” Moran said.
“We understand that AI is already being used by many, if not most of our students, to support their studies, but there are compromises that come with using AI as a direct client of a commercial provider.
“Access to the best models comes at a cost that not all our students can afford, and anyone signed up directly to an AI provider can expect that their data will be used for model training, and probably for other commercial purposes.”
Students will gain access to Madgwick progressively from next month.
The university said the platform will initially offer “access to LLMs, image-generation tools and a range of MCP [model context protocol] connectors”, which would link AI to existing university systems.
It said that “Madgwick’s underlying architecture is model-agnostic, so other models will be made available to students in future.”
