Digging Deep Into 2025’s Learning Trends: The State of Higher Education in ANZ

A senior C-Suite consultant, Harrison has had various roles at IBM, Gartner Inc. and LinkedIn before joining Instructure in 2017 to help drive and deliver the value of Canvas to the region.

Growing up on the Northern Beaches, Harrison attended Barker College before continuing his education at Sydney University and Macquarie University, where he quickly found himself interested in a wide spectrum of technology. 

At IBM, Harrison was responsible for pioneering emerging infrastructure services across banking, industrial and public sector markets. He then went on to consult C-level business executives at Gartner, helping develop and implement an effective enterprise-wide strategy that was delivered through their services.

At LinkedIn, he worked with organisations to showcase the value of being a part of, and contributing to, the world's first Economic Graph. This enabled a convergence of talent and opportunity to aid businesses in delivering on their corporate and strategic initiatives.

After learning about Instructure through his time at Gartner, Harrison could not wait to have the opportunity to bring Canvas to the market, enabling him to challenge the status quo with a truly innovative and extensible product that the education ecosystem needs.

Geoff Hinchcliffe is Pro Vice-Chancellor Learning & Teaching at the Australian University, a role that sees him devising and delivering initiatives to produce a distinctively ANU approach to education that is future-focused, active, engaged and generates an outstanding student experience. Since his commencement at ANU in 2016, Geoff has stewarded educational enterprise at school, college, and university levels, and has applied a designerly approach to enlivening learning through inclusive and collaborative process.

Danny is a molecular biologist by training, programmer by night, researcher and academic developer by day, and educator at heart. He works at the confluence of educational technology, student engagement, artificial intelligence, learning analytics, pedagogical research, organisational leadership, and professional development. He is currently a Professor in the Educational Innovation team in the DVC (Education) Portfolio at the University of Sydney

As Instructure’s Chief Academic Officer, Melissa is a champion for crucial customer-focused topics like data usage and privacy—and it’s her personal mission to drive innovation in our customer experience and enable customers to leverage our solutions in engaging and effective learning environments. Melissa has spent 20 years in educational technology working for a number of technology suppliers and educational institutions, as well as teaching leadership courses on managing technology for educational change. She has a master’s degree in educational policy from Teachers College, Columbia University and an MBA from Columbia Business School.