Voice-based AI for learning, training, and assessment
I'm Tony McGinn, a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Ulster University. In 2024, I realised I could no longer rely on written essays to assess what my students actually knew. Too many submissions read like AI output, and detection tools were unreliable. The essay, for decades the backbone of university assessment, was failing.
But the problem wasn't just cheating. It was validity. My students are training to be social workers. They'll sit across from families in crisis, children at risk, people in acute distress. They need to think on their feet and communicate under pressure. A polished essay tells me nothing about whether they can do that.
I started building HiEd.ai to solve this for my own classroom. The idea was straightforward: let students demonstrate their knowledge by talking, not typing. An AI agent conducts a realistic conversation, asks follow-up questions, and records everything for the lecturer to review and mark.
In December 2025, I tested it with 140 final-year social work students in a real, summative assessment. We surveyed the cohort afterwards: 68% preferred AI conversations to written assignments, and 78% preferred them over recorded presentations. Students ranked conversations first for building the skills they would actually use in practice. Several students said it was easier to talk to the AI than to a person, because it removed the social pressure of a face-to-face oral exam.
Since then the platform has hosted over 1,350 conversations across 400 students at Ulster University and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, with trials underway at other UK universities. HiEd.ai was awarded a TechStart NI Proof of Concept grant, and our research has been submitted for peer review.
I didn't set out to build an EdTech company. I set out to fix a problem in my own classroom. It turned out thousands of other educators had the same problem.
“I enjoyed marking the conversations and I can't say I have enjoyed marking more than a couple of essays in recent years due to students' use of AI.”
Sinéad McGonagle, Lecturer in Pharmacy at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, independently deployed HiEd.ai with 60 first-year pharmacy students after seeing the platform in action.
“I strongly believe assessed conversations are the way forward. It allows students who struggle to get their point across in written assignments show off their knowledge.”
HiEd.ai is grounded in published peer-reviewed research. Our work on assessed conversations in social work education is published in Social Work Education, the leading journal in the field.
McGinn, T., Pascoe, K.M. & Burns, P. (2024). Teaching social work students about evidence-based practice using peer-led learning and assessed conversations. Social Work Education, 44(6), 1519–1534.
Read on ResearchGate →A further paper reporting the survey results from our 140-student deployment has been submitted for peer review to Social Work Education (June 2026).