LBSC 690 Project

The project in LBSC 690 is designed to allow students to integrate and extend knowledge acquired throughout the course and to apply that knowledge to solve a problem of substantial scope. Students are required to work in teams of 3 that are assigned by the instructor, and teams should plan to devote approximately 125 hours outside of class to the project over the course of the semester (6 hours per person for 7 weeks). Experience suggests that successful teams require expertise in design, implementation, and project management.

Project Scope

Projects are required to make substantial use of at least two of the key technologies introduced in the course, integrated in a manner that is appropriate for their intended application: It is not required that students integrate these capabilities themselves; the use of a content management system such as Joomla will meet this requirement because Joomla includes all four capabilities.

Projects are also required to include significant real content; mock-ups that contain only a limited quantity of content for demonstration purposes would not be acceptable.

Projects are expected to have a real client (i.e., someone who wants the result). The reason for this requirement is twofold. First, (as you will learn!) real clients don't actually know what they want, even if they think they do. Trying to hit a moving target as the client's understanding of the task and what can be done evolves can be frustrating, but it is important to experience this both so that you will be ready for it when it happens in the "real world" and so that you can do your best when you are in the role of the client to plan for this. Second, there is a natural temptation in class projects to stick to what you know well rather than to learn what's needed to solve the real problem. Giving someone else control over the definition of the real problem can help to avoid this, and can drive you to learn what you need to.

A key question, therefore, is who your client will be. You can, of course, choose a project for which some natural client already exists (e.g., a business that needs a Web site). Or you can choose a project with some identifiable set of stakeholders (e.g., students who might use a new social media site that you want to create for iSchool students) and then later test your system with some of those stakeholders. But if there's something that you just want to do, and you're really the client, then you may need to recruit someone from another team to serve as the "client" so that they can help direct your work. Each of these approaches has challenges (for example, with the first scenario you need to manage the real client's expectations so that you don't promise more than you can deliver!), but any of them should be workable. What you want to avoid is just doing a "hobby project" where only you care about the result.

Planning

At the end of the first class after Spring Break, project groups will meet in class to nail down the details of their planned project. Each team will then make a brief (4-minute) minute presentation the following week to solicit feedback on their plans from other members of the class. Each team will produce a single written report and will present a 12-minute demonstration of their project during the last class session.

Teams are welcome (and indeed encouraged) to discuss their project with the professor before their four-minute presentation (in person, by phone, or by email) if they have any questions regarding scope or feasibility. It is important that the chosen project be sufficiently substantial to represent a significant accomplishment, but that it not be so complex that completion within the available time would be unlikely.

Four-Minute Initial Presentations

For your 4-minute presentation in the class session after the midterm, your objective should be to solicit reactions that might change the way you think about your project. You should use three slides: one to describe your goals, one that illustrates what a user would see, and one that describes the scope (i.e., what limitations you anticipate). This presentation is not graded. This presentation should be given by one person, but it should reflect the ideas of your entire team. The time constraint must be rigidly enforced if we are to stay within the scheduled class period.

Twelve-Minute Final Presentations

For your 12-minute final presentation, your objective should be to help people to understand what you did and to share with your classmates some of the unique things that you have learned. This presentation should be given by the two members of the group that did not present in the 4-minute presentation. The structure of this presentation will naturally vary depending on the nature of your project, but to the extent possible you should try to help your classmates to actually experience the use of what you have created in some way. As with all presentations, the time constraint must be rigidly enforced if we are to stay within the scheduled class period.

Written Project Report

The sole role of the project report is to convey information that cannot be conveyed as effectively during the final project presentation. The key here is the content, not the style of the report. So there are essentially no style guidelines except that I would like to be able to understand it (so it is helpful if it is well written), and I would like it to be reasonably concise (in my mind, about 5 pages, single spaced). The content of the report should address at least: Of course, different groups will devote more or less space to each of these, and some groups will add other things. For example, some groups might talk about changes that they made to their vision of who their customer really was along the way as they learned more. Others might talk about suggestions for supporting project groups in future semesters that would extend their capabilities. Others might want to write about group dynamics (perhaps as a form of "group therapy":). So there is no cookbook recipe for a good project report. The key is to learn a lot, and to describe what you have learned.

Consulting Support

The professor will be available for consultation with project teams by appointment, either in person or by phone, and questions can also be sent by email. Because project teams will be working with a diverse array of technologies and application environments, this assistance will necessarily focus more on strategies than details.

Project Ideas

Teams may select any topic for their project, but they should be careful to select a project for which the required content can be obtained in the available time. The following topics are offered as examples:

Apollo Archives

The Apollo missions to the moon, flown between 1968 and 1972, were the most extensively documented voyages of exploration ever conducted. Thanks to the efforts of a number of enthusiasts and companies, many of these records are now available in digital form. Each item documents one aspect of an event, but achieving a holistic understanding often requires simultaneous access to multiple perspectives. For example, recordings (and/or transcripts) are available from the control center, the spacecraft, and the radio transmissions between the two. Photographs are available from as many as five cameras at one time. There are a lot of interesting aspects of this problem that could be explored, and several application environments that might be considered (scholarly access, school library media centers, museum visitors, ...). Probably the best way to start is to check out http://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/frame.html to get to know some of the available content. If you are interested in this project, you should also see me to discuss digitized audio and video that is available from other sources.

Oral History

Students at the Saint Andrews Episcopal School in Potomac, MD create oral histories as part of their studies. They presently make transcripts of those oral histories available at http://www.DoingOralHistory.org. The school is interested in working with a local university to also make the audio from the interviews available as streaming media. This could involve synchronized delivery of audio and the video (see http://www.uaf.edu/library/oralhistory/jukebox/pjhome.htm for an example) or a less tightly coupled approach (see http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/1968/ for an example of that. Here are some example projects from prior semesters that are still available on the Web. Some additional projects can probably be found by following links from my home page during earlier semesters using the Internet Archive.

Project Grading

The project need not be perfect to receive a perfect grade -- projects are always a work in progress. The principal goal of the project is to facilitate learning by engaging deeply with the technology on some real task. Accordingly, the grading will focus on whether the level of accomplishment is sufficient to demonstrate that the expected learning has occurred. Moreover, there are many things to be mastered, including technical details, planning and management skills, and the actual needs of the client(s) who need the project that you are creating. Different people on the project team will surely learn different things. As a result of these considerations, grading for the project is necessarily holistic. Moreover, the grading will be accomplishment-oriented -- you earn credit by accomplishing things that demonstrate your learning, and you need not (and indeed could not) attain every type of accomplishment in any one project. Said another way, there are many ways to succeed. Of course, some successes are more impressive than others. Teams do not compete against each other for grades -- I would be happy to give every team an A if they earn it. But the only way to earn an A is by achieving notable success. A grade of B on the project (85% of the available points) would indicate performance at the expected level (a working system with some reasonable level of complexity, given the available time), and grades above that will be awarded for more exceptional accomplishments.

The most exceptional project of the semester may be nominated for the Dean's Award.

Doug Oard