The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly caused global upheaval in education. The sudden and mass migration of learning online has created challenges and opportunities for educators, educational technologists and researchers of educational technologies and will continue to do so for some time. As we discuss here, there is a likelihood that the COVID-19 pandemic will exacerbate the troubled relationships between policy, research and practice that have existed for the last decade. We focus here on the Australian context as a case in point and argue that changes to the funding of universities and research have contributed to a system in which the available technology has driven educational technology research. We argue that we have a moment to pause and consider how we might work more effectively together to create a better, evidence-informed future for learning with technologies in higher education.