Alan is a founding director and current Managing Director of Group Colleges Australia. As Managing Director he is responsible for the corporate planning and governance of the group of companies.

Alan has over thirty years experience in business management and marketing in the technology and education industries. He has twenty years experience as a Company Director with private and public companies. He is a former Director of the national Vocational Training industry representative body. He is currently a Board Member a national Higher Education Industry representative body.

He is the author of an autobiography:
First edition "One One Five, when there are too many lawyers”. Second edition “When there are too many lawyers, there is no justice."

Alan is a Justice of the Peace, a member of the Australian Computer Society and a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

Mr Khanche is the founding member and CEO of Australian Institute of Professional Education (AIPE). He is responsible for the over-all operations of the Institute and is actively involved in strategic planning and implementation of innovative educational products for both domestic and international markets via AIPE and StudyOnline. Mr Khanche graduated from UTS with a Master of Business Administration (Marketing major) in 2003 and has since been involved extensively in education marketing, project management and marketing research related areas of education. He has worked in the Australian education sector for over 10 years with Insearch:UTS, Central Queensland University, and Australian School of Medical Imaging (ASMI) and since 2008 has actively incorporated AIPE.

Since its inception, AIPE has achieved a market reputation as quality a multi-sector private education provider with established faculties in business, finance, tourism, customer service, marketing, project management and human resources. AIPE has already achieved an outstanding record as the recipient of several major awards for excellence.

These successes are one indication that AIPE has a tangible commitment to providing quality education and successful student outcomes. Mr Khanche is the current NSW Committee Member of the Australian Council for Private Higher Education (ACPET) and has also won the 2011, NSW Premier’s Export Award for Young Exporter of the Year.

Arun comes with 20 years of experience in solution architecture, sales and delivery /engagement leadership for large and complex transformation programs in the IT industry across Banking, Telecom, Insurance and Transportation and Logistics domains. For the last 12 years, Arun has been dedicated to building and leading Business Intelligence, Analytics and Data warehousing practices across geographies including Americas, Asia Pacific and Australia. He has been instrumental in leading large transformation programs and creating solution offerings providing tangible business value to customers.

Prior to joining CTS, Arun was the Worldwide Head of HCL Business Intelligence Services with responsibility for the Business Intelligence, Big Data and Business Analytics practice areas. He was responsible for defining the strategy for solution offerings and future growth, developing and growing Alliance relationships and building the practice globally.

His prior experiences include leading the Business Analytics and Optimization practice for Growth Markets (Rest of World excluding North America, Western Europe and Japan) for IBM. He was responsible for crafting the strategy for solution offerings and future growth, developing and growing Alliance relationships and running of operations in these markets. He was very successful in building a very large team of professionals across the Growth markets. He was the Practice Leader for Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing for Mahindra Satyam across Australia, New Zealand, North and South America, and built the practice from ground-up to a team of impressive magnitude.

Designing innovative tools that solve our clients’ challenges while transforming the educational landscape is crucial to the future of academics. As the Executive Director of CannonDesign’s education practice, Bradley Lukanic’s focus is on creating learning environments shaped by immersive client engagements that span the entire education spectrum. Lukanic is fully immersed in promoting vibrant campus cultures of teaching and learning supported by technology, how the pedagogical shift in learning environments is transforming learning communities and places for instruction, and how these buildings not only incorporate sustainable strategies but also visually convey environmental stewardship principles. An active member of the Association of College Unions International (ACUI), the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP), the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) and the American Library Association (ALA), Lukanic is keenly aware of education trends. He frequently speaks across North America on topics of education, and the millennial generation’s impact on living and learning spaces.

Previous roles:
Director, Higher Education Academy (UK) 2006-2010
Director, UK National Centre for Sociology, Anthropology and Politics, University of Birmingham UK 2004-2006
Dean of Social Sciences, University of Northampton (Uk) 2004-2006
Head of Historical and International Studies, De Montfort University Leicester (UK) 1991-2004
Senior Research Officer, Arms Control and Disarmament Research Unit, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, UK (1988-1991)

Member: Australian Government Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) Strategic Advisory Board 2012- and Deputy Chair OLT Grants Committee
UK Online Learning Taskforce (2009-2010)

Recognition: UK National Teaching Fellow (2005); Jean Monnet Fellowship x 2 (2002 and 2003).

Elizabeth is a leader who works to make organisations stronger, through driving a whole-of business approach to change. At the same time, she is passionate about making a difference in organisations through improved engagement, job enablement, and building leadership at all levels of a business.

Her success is evidenced through turnaround transformation of staff engagement scores, business outcomes, and talent retention.

Elizabeth has over twenty years' experience across a range of industries including education, property, mining, electricity, financial services and facilities management. Some time back, she also ran a small business whilst having three children in the space of four years.

Recently Elizabeth was promoted from the role of HR Director, to that of Operations Director Australasia for Study Group.

Study Group is a private education provider with key geographic operations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as Ireland, and the Netherlands.

Elizabeth’s role holds the operational leadership of a portfolio of colleges which provide domestic and international students with nationally-recognised vocational and higher education qualifications in state-of-the-art facilities and through the highest quality teaching.

She holds a Degree in Commerce from UNSW as well as a Masters in Management from MGSM.

Katharine McLennan is the QBE Head of the Global Leadership Academy with a combined career that spans corporate strategy, execution and leadership. Her most recent corporate role was Executive General Manager, Talent and Business Unit HR for Commonwealth Bank of Australia.

In addition to this corporate role, Katharine has spent the last 12 years as executive coach and leadership facilitator serving the Top ASX 50 clients of Heidrick & Struggles, Johnson, Mettle and PricewaterhouseCoopers, where she focused on C-suite preparation, development and succession planning.

Before becoming the passionate leadership developer, Katharine's execution and pragmatic sense was fully developed in her role as head of operational planning and execution of the Sydney Olympic Games between 1996 and 2000. Her corporate strategic background started from her formative years with Booz & Co across multiple industries around Australia throughout the early 1990's. Katharine has degrees with honours in Biology/Neuroscience and History (Duke), Business (MBA, Stanford), and Political Science (MA, UNSW) . She is also a qualified psychotherapist.

Dr Fisher practices both as a research academic and an educational planner.

Kenn is Director of Knowledge Environments in Woods Bagot acting as an educational planner involved in campus masterplanning, learning environment planning, brief writing and change management strategies. He has consulted widely across the globe including in Australia, China, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, USA, UK, the UAE, Qatar and New Zealand.

His 35 year career has seen him specialising in educational planning in all sectors – schools, vocational and higher education and workplace academies.

He is also an Associate Professor in Learning Environments in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at The University of Melbourne and has been a Chief and Partner Investigatore in approximately $2million of Australian Research Counciil Linkage Projects and Office of Learning and Teaching Research projects in the planning and design of learning environments. He is also co-supervising of a number of doctoral candidates and teaching M.Arch. courses in Human Environment Relations and Eduational and Health Planning & Design. His main research interests include the Evidence Based Design of learning environments and models of academic professional devleopment for New Generation Learning Environments.

Kenn is also a mamber of the international panel of experts for the Centre for Effective Learning Environments at the OECD (he was Head of CELE in Paris in 1997-8), as well as having held high level domestic University, Government Educational Ministries and Vocational Education appointments.

Leon Sterling is Pro Vice Chancellor (Digital Frontiers) at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Leon received a BSc(Hons) from the University of Melbourne and a PhD in Pure Mathematics from the Australian National University. He has worked at universities in the UK, Israel, the US, and Australia. His teaching and research specialties are software engineering, artificial intelligence, and logic programming. Prior to this role, Leon was Professor of Software Innovation and Engineering and Director of e-Research at the University of Melbourne, and Dean of Information and Communication Technologies at Swinburne. He is President of the Australian Council of Deans of ICT.

Matthew drives the TILT (Technology enabled Innovations in Learning & Teaching) Initiative for GLOBAL MINDSET. He has been active in identifying and implementing innovative uses of technology in education for over 25 years through his own companies and with leading distributors, manufacturers, publishers, teachers, lecturers and researchers in the field.

He has worked in over 20 countries visiting schools, universities, industry partners and research labs particularly throughout Australia and Asia. His experience founding a Sydney based international college led to interest in measuring student and teacher outcomes and an association with University of Melbourne Learning Environments and Research Network and the Faculties of Education and Architecture.

He successfully introduced a disruptive innovation to Australia & New Zealand that offered teachers instant face-to-face wireless feedback, which still has a leading role more than 10 years later. At Keepad Interactive, he aligned innovative learning and teaching practices with a full range of interactive hardware products with an early focus on ‘Peer Instruction’ through work with Professor Eric Mazur, Harvard.

As the focus of EdTech moved from hardware to software, he joined McGraw Hill Higher Education as Enterprise Solutions Manager, Australia and New Zealand and saw first hand the benefits of personalised and adaptive learning for University T&L Departments across Australia & New Zealand and highlighted the emerging trends in digital publishing and data analytics that give the lecturer immediate feedback on student progress.

Having developed a skill for picking high performing teams and technologies, Matthew hopes to use his extensive network of educator and industry contacts to connect leading players and highlight the issues holding back learning improvements. An outcome that would also make our export education sector more responsive and profitable.

Michael Staton is a Partner at Learn Capital. For five years, he has worked with industry leading companies, such as Dev Bootcamp, Quizlet, and Goalbook. He is the founder and former CEO of Inigral, now rebranded Uversity, the pioneer of Social Enrollment Management technology in Higher Education. For Inigral, Michael secured the first ever venture investment from the Gates Foundation into a private company. Because of his years as a public school teacher and his intuitive understanding of K12 education, Michael served as a Venture Partner and still serves as a Community Advisor to NewSchools Venture Fund’s EdTech Portfolio. Michael was declared a top one hundred innovator by the Chronicle of Higher Education, and he is on the advisory board of SxSW EDU and the Higher Education Working Group of the American Enterprise Institute.

Phillip Long is the Executive Director of Innovation and Analytics at the University of Queensland. He also holds the position of Professor of Innovation and Educational Technology in the School of ITEE, and founded the Center for Educational Innovation and Technology (CEIT). Dr. Long provides leadership to the university’s strategy for technology-enhanced learning.. Periodically he rekindles his passion for the academy by co-learning with students as an instructor in the School of ITEE. Phil also leads UQx, the local implementation of the edX MOOC project and the UQ Learning Analytics Initiative.

Phil’s current research interests focus on active & blended learning pedagogies, remote laboratories, emerging technologies and the analytics that can be captured by instrumenting interactions in both virtual and environments with the goal of informing learner decision-making.

His professional collaborations are eclectic and international. They include serving as edX Consortium Platform Committee Chair, co-editor for several journals, executive committee of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (http://www.solaresearch.org), co-chair of the Educause Learning Spaces Special Interest Group, and long-standing commitment to the New Media Consortium, its Horizon Project and its leadership, twice serving as chair of the New Media Consortium Board.

Dr. Long is a lapsed behavioral ecologist, having studied avian mating systems from the North Slope of Alaska to the coast of Patagonia. He is fascinated by the evolution of mating systems (who wouldn’t be?) and the biological bases for cooperation. He continues to enjoy birding when his is not pursuing his other hobbies of sailing and running.

Prabhat Hajela, Ph.D., is the Provost at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. In this role, he is responsible for all academic portfolios at the Institute, and, in collaboration with the Vice President for Research, works to strengthen the research missions of the Institute. Hajela has previously served as the Vice Provost & Dean of Undergraduate Education, where his broad administrative mandate included oversight of all undergraduate programs at the Institute, including engaging the five academic schools in program development and implementation.

Hajela has been active in several national and international organizations. He is a past Vice-President of the International Society of Structural & Multidisciplinary Optimization. He has also a past Chair of ASME’s Aerospace Division, an organization that serves over 10,000 ASME members with interest in Aerospace Engineering. In 2003, he served as a Congressional Fellow in the US Senate, responsible for Science and Technology Policy in the Office of Senator Conrad Burns (R-MT). He worked on several legislative issues related to aerospace and telecommunications policy, including the crafting of the anti-SPAM legislation (CAN-SPAM) that was signed into law in December 2003. He continues to serve on different National Academies Panels related to Aerospace and Aviation research, including the first Decadal Survey of Aeronautics and a review of Aeronautics Research Programs at NASA, and is on the NRC Technical Assessment Board for the Army Research Laboratory.

His research interests are in areas related to complex system analysis and design in the presence of uncertainties. He has conducted research at NASA’s Langley and Glenn Research Centers, and the Eglin Air Force Armament Laboratory. He also worked at the Boeing Company as the Boeing-A.D. Welliver Fellow in 1995. He has published over 275 papers and articles in the areas of structural and multidisciplinary optimization, and is an author/editor of 4 books in these areas. He has held editorial assignments and serves on the editorial boards of several international journals. In 2004, he was the recipient of AIAA’s Biennial Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Award. Hajela is a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), a Fellow of the Aeronautical Society of India (AeSI), and a Fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Pradeep Khanna, A passionate thought leader in providing virtual and global services insights, Pradeep focuses on globalisation, digitisation & services intensification

As Executive Director of ‘Integrating Australia with Asia’ , Pradeep aims to position Australia strategically in Asian Services Marketplace. Pradeep organises and presents premium events with premium speakers & premium audiences. Pradeep is developing Virtual & Global Services Hub of academia, consulting & industry from Australia, India & other Asian countries.

He is Managing Director of GLOBAL MINDSET, thought leading research and consulting company heavily involved in all aspects of virtual & global services, & global sourcing

With over 25 years of executive & management experience across number of industries, Pradeep has been Leader for IBM GBS Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) leveraging India, China, Philippines, Vietnam, Egypt, Romania, Brazil & Argentina for A/NZ . He has worked on assignments involving IBM, Australian Trade Commission, Optus, Westpac, Qantas, ING, Crompton Greaves etc

He is also Chairperson, Branding & Treasurer of IITian Association of Australia (IITAA), Chairman of Royal Star, Global Executive Member at IIT Delhi AA, & Director (Consulting) at Mindfields Consulting.

He is mentor at UNSW, AIBC & other places. Pradeep did his MBA from AGSM (UNSW), M.Sc, Computer Science from UTS, & B Tech from IIT Delhi.

Prasad is the CEO of the Kaipa Group in California and offers coaching, keynotes, executive seminars, and programs in the areas of wise/conscious/personal leadership, cross-cultural and Asian models of innovation and leadership, ingenuity and inspiration, transformational leadership and mental models. to C-suite executives, boards and companies. He was the founding Executive Director and raised multimillion dollar funding for the Center for Leadership, Innovation and Change (CLIC) in the Indian School of Business (ISB). He was a Smith Richardson Visiting Fellow at Center for Creative Leadership between 2010-2011 and was an advisor to Business FAC of Fetzer Institute (2011-2013). Prasad taught executive education programs organized by INSEAD, LBS, USC, Dartmouth and ISB. He co-wrote ‘From Smart to Wise’ (http://www.fromsmarttowise.com) with Navi Radjou for Jossey Bass (2013) and it received critical acclaim world-wide and was on the top 10 list of business books in India for several weeks.

Prasad has been an advisor and coach focusing on change management, innovation and leadership since 1990 for about 120 C-level executives in Global Fortune 500 companies. Clients included Adobe, Boeing, Disney, Johnson & Johnson, Maxim, Nokia and Oracle as well as global/entrepreneurial companies like Aztec, Advanta, BAE Systems, Lunar Design, Mastek, Olixir, Polaris, State Bank of India and Scintera Networks. The purpose of Prasad’s innovation/leadership coaching is to ignite the genius within individuals. Prasad’s unique competence is in helping his clients find their next significant step and take it. He found that unless he helps clients to examine their signature strengths that have turned into “core incompetence” and kept them stuck, it is difficult to ignite and channel their creativity to come up with innovative decisions, products, and services. He assists clients in becoming effective in managing people as well as oneself (personal mastery), getting reenergized and building new capacities, and taking more risks, in addition to innovative and strategic decisions.

Raju Varanasi is the Chief Operating Officer at Education Services Australia with responsibilities for strategy, operations and service development.

Prior to joining ESA in Dec 2012, Raju worked in the NSW Department of Education and Communities as a senior executive for 21 years in Curriculum, Strategy, Policy and Innovation in both Schools and TAFE.

As Director NSW CLIC Mr Varanasi’s key responsibilities included the promotion of a culture of innovation through the development and implementation of major teaching and learning initiatives using ICT.

Mr Varanasi is an Australian Fulbright Scholar and was a Director in TAFE NSW for several years prior to becoming a General Manager, NSW Centre for Learning Innovation.

He has considerable experience in the development and delivery of digitally based services for both school and vocational education across Australia.

Sangeet is a widely published technology industry analyst, CXO and board-level advisor/consultant, educator at leading universities and writer of the blog Platform Thinking, best known for his work on the design and execution of digital networks, platforms, marketplaces and connected business models. As Director of Platform Thinking Labs, Sangeet engages in CXO-level and board-level advisory towards the design and implementation of platform strategies and networked business models and has worked with clients across multiple industries in Europe, North America and Asia. His work on this topic has been recommended and featured on major publications globally, including WSJ, HBR, WIRED, Fast Company, Forbes and Inc. He has lectured at leading academic institutions including the MIT Media Labs, UC Davis and INSEAD and works as part of an industry-focused research collaboration with MIT-based scientists Marshall Van Alstyne and Geoffrey Parker. Sangeet is also a regular keynote speaker at leading industry conferences including SIBOS and TheNextWeb Europe and an industry mentor at 500Startups.

Tim Dodd leads the education coverage in the Financial Review, editing the weekly Monday education section and co-ordinating the daily coverage of education issues. He writes a weekly column, Education Observed, published on Mondays. He has over 20 experience as a journalist covering public policy, economic and political issues.

For 20 years I was a Strategy Consultant for some great firms producing robust analysis and fancy powerpoint slides for the management of our leading Australian companies. I did however grow increasingly frustrated with the lack of execution and the slides simply gathering dust. It was such a waste. It became clear to me that many leaders and managers lacked the skills to get people engaged to action the well thought out recommendations.

I initially founded the Deloitte Leadership Academy to develop executives so they can better lead their people and in January 2014 went out on my own and launched Latitude Learning Academy to focus solely on developing the capabilities of managers and leaders so they can better engage their people to execute strategy.

Unfortunately traditional classroom training is still the staple of many Australian organisations and it is not delivering. As workforce demographics and technology change so do the learners needs. Companies who do not adapt and respond to these changes are not getting the lift in productivity and productivity they expect from their investment in learning.

By leveraging cutting edge technologies I am helping Rio Tinto, Atlassian, UXC, World Vision and other inspiring companies lead the world in how they develop and engage their people and ultimately improve the performance of their businesses and our lucky country.

As Director of Executive Education at Australian Catholic University, Tom works with executive teams from many of Australia’s largest organisations and government agencies to build individual capability and organizational capacity.

Tom’s unique experience includes 7 years in the university sector at ACU and Macquarie University and 16 years of management experience in finance and management consulting.

He holds a BA in Administration & Economics, a Graduate Diploma in Management, an MBA and is currently completing a Masters in Tertiary Education Management.

Vijay K. Thadani is the Chief Executive Officer of NIIT Ltd, a leading Global Talent Development Corporation. As the co-founder of NIIT Group, he has built an organization that is recognised for its visionary role in bringing the benefits of Information Technology, both as a professional skill and as a learning tool, to the masses. Vijay led the Group’s globalization efforts since 1991, taking the NIIT flag to over 40 countries. He also serves on the Board of NIIT Technologies Limited.

Vijay has served in important capacities with industry bodies like MAIT, National Accreditation Board for Education and Training (NABET), QCI. He was the Chairman of CII Northern Region for 2011-12 and has served as Chairman of Board of Governors of Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Allahabad.

Vijay is the co-founder of the not-for-profit NIIT University established in 2009. He is also a member of the India Advisory Board of the Maastricht University, Netherlands; India Advisory Board of Project Management Institute (PMI), USA and the Governing Council of All India Management Association (AIMA).

A ‘Distinguished Alumnus’ of the premier Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, Vijay was honored with the position of ‘Economic Consultant’ to Chongqing, world’s largest city in the People’s Republic of China.

Vivek is the founder and CEO of Liqvid. The company derives its name from two words – ‘vid’ for ‘to know’ in Sanskrit and ‘liquidus’ for ‘fluid, flowing’ in Latin. The idea is to provide personalised learning that takes the shape of the learner.

Liqvid is focussed on providing English language learning solutions – English Edge – to individuals and organisations. Liqvid follows a unique technology based, blended learning methodology that leverages the power to technology to make learning scalable. The English Programs are offered on PCs, Tablets and Mobiles. Liqvid has more than 250,000 learners across schools, colleges, vocational institutes and corporate for this program and its customers include IIT Delhi, Jamia Milia, British Council and Educomp. Liqvid also has a tie-up with BBC Active.


Before starting Liqvid, Vivek had co-founded egurucool. eGurucool emerged as the pioneer in the field of elearning in India, combining a unique learning methodology and a huge infrastructure of technology and content creation processes. The Investors included Newscorp and IFC, Washington. eGurucool was subsequently sold to NIIT.

Vivek has done his MBA from Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. He has been regularly speaking in conferences and seminars in India and abroad including the UK and USA.

He has a passionate interest in education and is committed to exploring how technology can be used to make high quality education and training available to a very large number of people at a cost that they can afford and at a place they can reach.

Lou Coenen has spent most of his career in international business marketing, sales and technology services organisations at IBM, Telstra, GE, Matra Groupe in multiple industry sectors throughout the US, UK, Europe, and Austral-Asia. He has presented at a number of conferences on the subject of technology selection and implementation, successful outsourcing, and turn-around leadership. He is currently teaching International Business and Marketing topics as well as Entrepreneurship at Universities in Australia and Germany. He has an M Sc (Mgt) and is a member of the Australian Institute of Corporate Directors.