In late 2014 collaborative research was undertaken between colleagues in the departments of Computer Science, International Communications, the Centre for English language Education (CELE), and the Language Centre at a global higher education institution (HEI-A), located partly in mainland China. This research aims to explore student note-taking habits, especially in the context of more multimedia-intense content. As part of this, student note-taking habits have been observed and studied, and a software application is being developed which will both support student multimedia note-taking, and facilitate research into note-taking habits. An interesting aspect of this project has been the inclusion of HEI-A undergraduate computer science students as software developers. This paper outlines some findings of our research in terms of defining student note-taking habits, describes some of the issues we faced during the first stages of the project and gives a short description on how this application could be used for teaching and research purposes in the future.