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For Australian Universities, TAFEs and RTOs

If you’re reading this from inside an Australian university, TAFE, or RTO, welcome. This page is for you, specifically.

I’m Rodney Lunt, a Queensland-based sales leader in the Australian electrical wholesale industry and a current postgraduate student at QUT, on the pathway to a Master of IT (Computer Science). I’m building GradeMap, an AI study coach designed for Australian postgrad students, because I needed it myself. I’m also the author behind every first-person article on this site, and you can read the full story of why GradeMap exists in What is GradeMap.

This page exists because I regularly get asked by educators whether GradeMap could integrate with their LMS, whether it would be suitable for a cohort pilot, or whether I’d be open to research collaborations. The answer to all of those questions is yes, but the how requires a real conversation rather than a form submission. This page gives you the context you need before that conversation.

What GradeMap is today (honest version)

  • An AI study coach built for Australian postgrad workflows, covering rubric decoding, feedback mapping, cross-subject context tracking, and assignment-level support.
  • Single-student, subject-aware: a student loads their course materials (rubrics, briefs, learning outcomes) once per subject. GradeMap holds that context persistently and uses it to ground every subsequent coaching conversation in the student’s actual assessment criteria.
  • Coaching, not content generation: GradeMap is deliberately designed to help students understand what markers want, not to generate submittable content. It stays firmly on the permitted side of TEQSA’s student-facing AI guidance and the AI policies at every Australian university I’ve checked (including Sydney, Melbourne, ANU, QUT and UQ).
  • Built by a student for students: I use GradeMap every week in my own Graduate Diploma at QUT. If it doesn’t work for me, it doesn’t ship.

What GradeMap is NOT today (equally important)

  • Not a content-generation tool. It doesn’t write assignments. It explains rubrics, highlights gaps, and teaches students what HD-level work looks like in their specific subject. The distinction matters because it’s the line every Australian university’s academic-integrity policy draws.
  • Not integrated with any LMS yet. No Canvas connector, no Moodle hooks, no automatic rubric ingestion. Students currently paste their materials in manually. I can explain exactly why that’s the current state and what it would take to change; see the next section.
  • Not yet researched at scale. Product validation to date has involved seven in-depth interviews with Australian uni students plus dozens of informal conversations with fellow students, colleagues, and customers. That’s a deliberately small evidence base for an early-stage product. It’s credible for a founder making design decisions, but it’s not a substitute for the formal academic evaluation that a real institutional partnership would produce.

Integration: the honest story

GradeMap’s data model was designed with LMS integration in mind from day one. Canvas and Moodle compatibility is baked into how the tool structures subjects, rubrics, and assignments internally, not tacked on later as an afterthought. A properly-scoped Canvas or Moodle integration is a feature I could ship. The reason I haven’t is that I’d rather build one integration with a partner who actually needs it than ship two or three speculative integrations that nobody uses.

If you’re interested in any of the following, I’d genuinely like to hear from you:

1. LMS rubric ingestion pilots

Canvas and Moodle both expose rubrics in structured formats. A sensible first integration would let a student (or their instructor) pull a rubric directly from their LMS into GradeMap instead of copy-pasting it, with the relationship between the LMS rubric and the in-GradeMap assessment maintained over time so feedback can flow back the other way. Building this with a real institution, where I can see real rubric shapes, real edge cases, and real student workflows, is significantly better than building it in isolation.

2. Student-support pilots

If your institution runs an Academic Learning Advisor programme, a writing centre, or a postgraduate transition support service, and you’re curious whether an AI coaching tool fits alongside the human support you already provide, I’m open to running a small, time-boxed pilot with a cohort of willing students. The goals would be practical: does GradeMap reduce the “I don’t know what this rubric means” question load on your ELAs? Does it improve student confidence in interpreting feedback? Do students actually use it? I’d expect to co-design the evaluation with you rather than impose a generic metric.

3. Research collaborations

GradeMap sits in an interesting research space: AI in higher education, mature-age student support, assessment feedback loops, rubric literacy. If you’re a researcher studying any of these areas and you’d find access to an AI study tool useful for a formal study (case study, controlled pilot, observational research), I’d be open to providing access and reasonable tooling support in exchange for the research outputs.

4. Anything adjacent

This list isn’t exhaustive. If your angle on GradeMap doesn’t fit any of the above but feels adjacent (a speaker slot at a teaching-and-learning conference, an invited guest lecture on scratch-your-own-itch EdTech, a policy conversation about AI literacy curriculum), I’m interested in that too. The worst outcome of a conversation is that we both walk away a bit wiser; the best outcome is that we find work that benefits your students and validates GradeMap as a real tool.

What I’m bringing to the conversation

  • 17+ years in Australian commercial sales leadership across electrical wholesale and renewable energy. Most recently, I’m leading sales for the Queensland North region of one of Australia’s fastest-growing online electrical wholesalers (600% year-over-year growth in the last 12 months). I understand commercial operations, partnerships, and how to scope a practical piece of work realistically.
  • A completed MBA at Swinburne and a current Graduate Diploma in IT at QUT. I’ve been a mature-age postgrad student for nine years across three different Australian institutions (Swinburne, Deakin, QUT), and I know the disjointed-systems problem from the inside. The full story is in the mature-age pillar article.
  • Hands-on software delivery: I hold an Anthropic Claude Code In Action certification (2026) and I’m building GradeMap, businessreview360.au, and choresandrewards.app in parallel with my day job and my studies. I can move quickly on a well-scoped piece of integration work.
  • Mentorship experience at scale: I’m a Post-Graduate Student Mentor alumnus at Swinburne Online (officially-sanctioned programme, 2019 to 2020), and I’m currently a business mentor with the Digital Leap Moreton Bay Mentoring Program (profile here). I know how to work with small cohorts respectfully.

How to get in touch

Email: rodney@grademap.com.au

I read every message personally. Tell me:

  1. Who you are and what role you’re in. I want to understand whether you’re approaching as an individual educator, a programme lead, a technology team, a researcher, or someone else.
  2. Your institution and the general shape of what you’re thinking about. You don’t need to have a full proposal; a paragraph describing the problem you’d want to solve is enough.
  3. Your rough timeline. Some partnerships are “let’s chat next month”, others are “we need something in 6 weeks for a pilot”, others are “we’re thinking about a 2027 project”. All are welcome, but the conversation shape differs.

I’ll shout the coffee (or the virtual equivalent) when we talk.

One more thing

I want to be upfront about what I’m optimising for. I’m not trying to turn GradeMap into a large commercial EdTech company. I’m trying to build a tool that solves a real problem I face as a mature-age student, ship it responsibly, and find institutional partners whose students would actually benefit. If your institution is looking for an aggressively-scaled SaaS vendor with dedicated account management, I’m not that. If you’re looking for an independent developer who will work with you on a well-scoped, honest piece of integration or research work, that’s exactly the kind of conversation I’d love to have.

Thanks for reading this far. I look forward to hearing from you.

Rodney