Title page and visualization from the Beyond Note-Taking research publication
Research, Simulation & Experimental Technology

Beyond Note-Taking

Spoken Knowledge, Made Visible.

The difficult idea

Support examiners with richer evidence from oral assessments without automating academic judgment or exporting sensitive material.

FTL role
AI research, system architecture, local deployment, evaluation and research communication
Domain
Universities & Institutions · Science & Simulation
Format
Publication · Research system · Assessment workflow
Credits
Developed at MUC.DAI, Munich University of Applied Sciences, by Maximilian Dauner, Ricky Liu and Gudrun Socher.
01

Context

Oral examinations reveal reasoning in real time, yet they are difficult to document consistently and leave little time for detailed feedback.

02

Creative vision

Make spoken evidence searchable, traceable and useful while keeping final evaluation exclusively with the examiner.

03

Challenge & constraints

Speech processing, institutional knowledge, rubric alignment, uncertainty and local privacy requirements had to operate coherently.

04

What was made

Readable examiner reports and structured observations with timestamps, rubric alignment and explicit uncertainty warnings.

05

What was built

A locally hosted workflow combining audio standardization, diarization, aligned speech recognition, retrieval and language-model analysis.

Dual lens

Experience / System

The outcome and the infrastructure remain part of the same project truth.

Title page and visualization from the Beyond Note-Taking research publication

What people see and feel

Evidence for examiners

A readable report connects observations to speaker-attributed transcripts, course material and assessment criteria.

Human + technical orchestration

Direction remains visible at every stage.

Human responsibility

  • Provide rubric and course context
  • Review every observation
  • Accept, revise or reject suggestions
  • Make the final assessment

Technical responsibility

  • Enhance audio
  • Identify speakers
  • Align transcripts
  • Retrieve relevant knowledge
  • Generate bounded observations
Iteration & validation

An initial evaluation compared instructor assessments with the framework across eleven complete student cases and three project milestones; high-stakes use still requires calibration, bias monitoring and explicit oversight.

Output & deployment

All components operate inside institutional infrastructure.

Reusable capability

A privacy-preserving, traceable assessment-support environment that can be calibrated for institutional practice.

Learning

Research becomes useful when limitations, evidence, local deployment and the human decision boundary are designed into the system.

Evidence & limits

Claims carry their context.

Published

The research was published and presented at the 2026 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference, EDUCON, in Cairo.

What becomes possible next

Extend multimodal understanding and evaluation while preserving examiner authority.