You are expected to meet your supervisor every week to discuss your project's progress, starting in Week 1 of teaching. This may be in the form of formal reports to your supervisor by sending emails, or through informal ace-to-face meetings. At the end of the term, your supervisor will evaluate and mark your progress in the project. This process encourages you to work to a plan, and to actively replan if necessary.

This assignment involves two steps: Reporting (worth 3 marks) and Presentation (worth 2 marks). The aim here is to get you to collect the important information together in 500 words. First step: a reporting is to be submitted in Week 2. This report consists of an Abstract, including the following details about your project:

• aim of the project
• research problem and/or research question
• significance and benefits
• methodology to be used
• expected outcomes

Please ensure that your document is submitted with a filename that has the following format:

• ‹FamilyName_Givenname›_Abstract.pdf

So, for example, if David Wu was submitting a report abstract, it would have the following filename:

• David_Wu_Abstract.pdf

Assessment of Project Abstract

The abstract will be assessed according to the following rubric.

The second step is a Presentation. Your Initial Project Presentation is a four-minute in-class presentation (including one minute for Q&A) that you will give in class in Week 3: its function is to ensure that you have established a project and understood what its goals are. It also gives me an idea of your ability to make presentations.

This page explains the requirements for the Initial Project Presentation that you are required to submit for ITEC810.

Submission Requirements for the Initial Presentation

You should submit your Initial Project Presentation, in the form of a PowerPoint file consisting of no more than four slides including your title slide, via the class iLearn website. The limited time we have available means that you will be given three minutes to present your slides in class (and one minute for Q&A).

The Aims of Initial Presentation

This assignment has the following aims.

1. It forces you to establish some key parameters regarding your project as early as possible.
2. It makes sure you get over your first taste of stage fright early in the semester.
3. It gives others an idea of your current level of ability and comfort in giving presentations.

Don't be deceived by the fact that the deliverable for this assignment is only a four-minute presentation: you are expected to put a significant amount of work into its preparation, and you will be assessed on that basis. You must ensure that you have rehearsed your presentation carefully: under no circumstances will you be able to go beyond the allocated four minutes you have for presenting your material. Within that time-frame, your aim is to communicate to the class what problem you are trying to solve, why it is important, and the approach you intend to take.

Presentation Format and Structure

Make sure your submission meets the following requirements.

1. Your presentation should be provided as a PowerPoint file or a PDF file consisting of no more than four slides.
2. Read the Hints and Tips on Giving Presentations document for a checklist of things to watch out for in preparing and presenting your slides.
3. Your first slide should be a title slide that gives the title of your project, your name, your student number and your supervisor's name.
4. Your second slide should communicate the key problem your project aims to solve, and indicate why the problem is important; you should do this in two or three bullet points at most. Aim to be clear and concise.
5. Your third slide should indicate the approach you intend to take, in the form of a numbered list of steps. You can think of this as a high-level project plan.
6. Your fourth slide can consider potential results and summarise what you are trying to achieve.

Your goal is to communicate an understanding of your project to the audience; bear in mind that your audience is your classmates, and you cannot assume that they will be familiar with your topic area.

Please ensure that your slides are submitted with a file-name that has the following format:

• ‹FamilyName_Givenname›_abstractPres.ppt (or .pdf as required)

So, for example, if I was submitting my presentation, it would have the following file name:

• Nayak_Abhaya_abstractPres.ppt (or .pdf)

Assessment of Initial Project Presentation

The initial Presentation will be assessed according to the following rubric.

Your Project Proposal, due in Week 4, is a short document that gives you the opportunity to communicate clearly at the outset of your project the specific problem you are addressing, how you intend to solve it, and what existing resources or materials you will build on; it also requires you to establish a first cut at a detailed plan for achieving your stated outcomes. This kind of planning exercise is essential for success in any project.

This page outlines the requirements for project proposals. The aim here is to get you to collect the important information together in 5-6 pages. Note that this is a piece of work that is expected to take you around 5-6 days of effort, and is the result of you spending some time looking deeper into what is required to carry out your project. In particular, note that it requires you to plan at a more detailed level than you did for the presentation in Week 2. The expectation is that you will spend on the order of 20 hours working on your proposal, so if you are allocating the same amount of time to this unit each week, you will need to have started on this task in week 1.

Submission Requirements for Project Proposal

You should submit via the class iLearn website a 5-6 page project proposal that outlines the background to and objectives of your project, and lays out a plan for how you will achieve these objectives. This should be provided as a PDF document, and named ‹FamilyName_Givenname›_Proposal.pdf.

You should also provide five or six slides that you will use to give a five-minute presentation on your detailed task plan. Your presentation should begin with a title slide and then a slide that succinctly states the aim of your project; the remaining slides should provide a detailed picture of how you intend to carry out the project. This should be provided as a powerpoint (or pdf) document, and named ‹FamilyName_Givenname›_proposalPres.ppt (or .pdf).

The Aims of Project Proposal

This assignment has a number of aims.

1. It ensures you get a head start on your project early in the semester.
2. It forces you to learn enough about your topic to be able to develop a plan for how you will approach the problem.
3. It forces you to think about your project in terms of a plan with specific steps and deliverables, and a clearly specified outcome.
4. It provides me with a first example of what your writing is like, so I can determine particular areas of weakness that need to be addressed.

Project Proposal Format and Structure

Make sure your submission meets the following requirements.

1. Your proposal should have a cover page containing the title of your project, your name, yout student ID, and your supervisor's name.
2. The document should begin with an abstract or summary of 100-150 words in length that is able to stand alone as a concise and comprehensive description of your project.
3. Section 1 of your document should be entitled Project Description. This has two subsections:
   • a 'Background' section of no more than one page in length, which sketches the background to the project, providing a context against which the significance of your project and its aims can be assessed; and
   • an 'Aims, Significance and Expected Outcomes' section of around 1-2 pages in length, which clearly states the aims of your project, why it is important, and what the specific expected outcomes of the project are; you can use distinct subsubsections for each of these three topics if you feel this helps you structure your material.
4. Section 2 of your document should be entitled 'Methodology and Plan'. Again, this consists of two subsections:
   • an 'Approach' or 'Methodology' section of around one page in length that outlines how you intend to go about solving the problem that your project addresses; and
   • a 'Task Plan' section of around one page in length that lays out the sequence of steps involved; see below for further notes on your Task Plan.
5. You may also add a reference list or bibliography that contains full details of any materials cited in your project proposal text.

In terms of general formatting requirements:

• Don't use a point size smaller than 11 point.
• Make sure your pages and sections are numbered.
• Make sure you thoroughly spell and grammar check your document before submitting it.

Task Plans

In many ways the Task Plan is the heart of your proposal: it's an explicit commitment to what you intend to do and when. For that reason, it needs to be very specific in a number of ways:

1. Each task should be given a number and a short descriptive name.
2. Each element in the task plan should have a clear descriptive paragraph so it is easy to see what is involved and what is not involved.
3. Each task should have a clearly specified deliverable, so that it is easy to determine when the task is completed. This might be a document or major part of a document, or a piece of working code, for example.
4. Each task should have a clearly specified delivery deadline. These should generally be one week apart, so that you can easily and clearly report against the task plan in your weekly progress reports. You may have tasks that contain subtasks, particularly if a task corresponds to several deliverable items; the bottom line is that you should make everything structurally as explicit as possible, so the correspondences between tasks, timeline, expected effort and specific outcomes is absolutely clear. Bear in mind that each elapsed week is assumed to correspond to around 9-10 hours of work on your project.

You should factor in the project-related assessable items for the unit as project deliverables, but obviously these should not be the only deliverables. Do not include your ethics assignment in your task plan, since this has nothing to do with your project.

Your Task Plan should be described in detail in your proposal document, but it should also be the focus of the slide presentation you submit along with your proposal. In most cases task plans will consist of four or five high-level tasks, each with some subtasks; you should allocate one slide per high-level task. In the class presentations, your aim will be to convince us that you have thought through the steps involved in your project in significant detail.

Assessment of Project Proposal

Your project proposal is worth 7 marks for Reporting (in Week 4) and 3 marks for Presentation (in Week 5). Please see the Initial Project Presentation Assessment criteria for the assessment of Project Proposal Presentation. Reporting section of Project Proposals will be assessed by the teaching staff according to the following rubric:

Report Outline indicates what the proposed structure and content of your final project report will be. This forces you to plan out your final report, and provides a means for obtaining feedback on your final project report before you actually write it; you can think of this as a summary of your final report. The Report Outline is due in Week 6 but Report Outline Presentations take place in Week 9 and Week 10.

Submission Requirements for Report Outline

You should submit your Report Outline in the form of a 5-10 page PDF document. You should also provide five or six slides that you will use to give a five-minute presentation on your report outline.

The Aims of Report Outline

This assignment has the following aims.

1. It forces you to plan out the structure of your final report before you begin writing it.
2. It allows you to get feedback about your plans for the final report before you commit too many words to paper.
3. It provides feedback on your writing.

Report Outline Format and Structure

Your report outline is intended to serve as a plan for your final report, so it's important to think about what that document will contain.

Your final report is likely to contain between five and eight major sections, and so your report outline should reflect that structure. The first section of your final report will be your introduction, and the last will be your conclusions section; what the other sections are depends very much on the specifics of your project, and it is imperative that you discuss the possibilities here with your supervisor.

A good strategy in writing is to tell the reader what you are going to tell them, tell it, and then tell them what you've told them. The first of these elements is what we have also referred to in class as a 'road map' for the document. Translated to the context of your final report, your introductory section is where you provide a road map for the rest of the document, and the conclusions section is where you tell the reader what you have told them in the intervening sections.

You can apply the same structure at the next level down: each major section should begin with a subsection that outlines what the section contains, and ends with a subsection that summarizes what the section has contained and what has been learned as a result.

Given this structure, you can think of your report outline as consisting of these initial subsections of the final report.

Make sure your submitted report outline meets the following requirements.

1. Your outline should be provided as a PDF file of 5-10 pages in length.
2. The structure of your document should mirror the intended structure of your final report: for each major section you intend to have in the final report, you should have a section in the outline.
3. The document should have a separate title page, and begin with an abstract or summary of 150-200 words in length that is able to stand alone as a concise and comprehensive description of your project's objectives, approach and expected outcomes.
4. For each intended major section in your final report, provide a page that outlines what you will cover in that section. Each page should be structured as a set of paragraphs that correspond to the subsections that will appear within that section. As noted above, you should view these as first drafts of the introductory subsections of each section of the final report.
5. Write in coherent prose. It is not appropriate just to provide bullet points; it is important that you provide a coherent summary of what your final report will contain, since the document will be assessed by staff who have no prior exposure to your project.

Please ensure that your document is submitted with a filename that has the following format:

• ‹FamilyName_Givenname›_Outline.pdf.

Similarly, you will submit for presentation a document is submitted with a filename that has the following format:

• ‹FamilyName_Givenname›_outlinePres.ppt (or .pdf).

Assessment of the Report Outline

Your report outline is worth 15 marks. It includes an Abstract worth 5 marks; an Outline worth 5 marks; and and a Presentation that is worth 5 marks. The first two are due in Week 6 and the last one is due by Week 9. The outline will be assessed according to the following rubric. For the assessment of presentation, please see Initial Project Presentation section.

The aim of the Abstract Section of the Report Outline is to get you to summarise the most important information together regarding your final project and provide you with some feedback  prior to submission of your final report. This is an abstract including the following details about your project:

• aim of the project
• research problem and/or research question
• significance and benefits
• research methodology (approach)
• expected outcomes and/or findings

The abstract should be 150-200 words in length and able to stand alone as a concise and comprehensive description of your project's objectives, approach and outcomes.

For this assignment you are required to write a short report (Ethics summary) that allows you to express yourselves about the ethical issues regarding your project. The assignment will be detailed on ilearn.

Please ensure that your Ethics summary is submitted with a filename that has the following format:

• ‹FamilyName_Givenname›_Ethics.pdf

You are expected to read the Australian Computer Society's Code of Ethics and Code of Conduct  (https://www.acs.org.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/30964/ACS_Ethics_Case_Studies_v2.1.pdf).

The aim of the exercise is write a report with regard to an ethical situation in IT in the last 6 months. Note that you are not being assessed on your particular views of the situation, so the particular course of action you elect to pursue does not impact on your marks; you are being assessed on your ability to reason clearly about the situation, and on your ability to analyse and discuss the consequences of the Code of Ethics.

Assessment of Ethics Summary

The Ethics summary will be assessed according to the following rubric.

Your Final Report involves two steps: Final Project Presentation and Final Project Report.

Your Final Project Presentation is a verbal summary of the results of your project, which you present at the end of semester workshop.

The ITEC810 End-of-Semester Workshop provides an opportunity for everyone in the class to present the results of their project work carried out during the course of the semester. The workshop will take place in Week 12 from 6pm until 9pm. Because there are many students in the class, the workshop may be organised as two parallel sessions, held in two separate rooms. Each presentation will be allotted 20 minutes including time for questions; typically this will be made up of 15 minutes for the presentation and five minutes for questions.

This page outlines the requirements for your final project presentation, which you will give at the end-of-semester workshop.

Submission Requirements for Final Project Presentation

No later than the specified deadline, you should submit via the class iLearn website the slides for the end-of-semester presentation. These should provide a summary of

• (a) your initial problem specification;
• (b) relevant related work and background sources;
• (c) the approach you took to solving the problem; and
• (d) the outcomes of your work. 

The slides should be provided as a PowerPoint or pdf document.

The Aims of Final Project Presentation

This assignment has the following aims.

1. It allows you to demonstrate your ability to give a coherent 15-minute presentation that communicates the key aspects of your project.
2. It provides a sense of closure for your work in the unit.

Final Project Presentation Format and Structure

Your presentation at the end of semester workshop will be assessed. Presentations will be 15 minutes long, with a further 5 minutes allocated for questions and changeover between presenters. It is essential that you carefully prepare and rehearse your talk to ensure that it can be delivered within the allotted time. Session chairs have strict instructions to stop you when 15 minutes have elapsed.

Ensure your presentation is submitted with a filename that has the following format:

• ‹FamilyName_Givenname›_finalPres.ppt (or pdf)

Remember to revisit the Hints and Tips on Giving Presentations document for a checklist of things to watch out for in preparing and presenting your contribution. 

Assessment of Final Project Presentation

Your final presentation is worth 10 marks, and will be assessed according to the following rubric:

Your Final Project Report to be submitted in Week13 is a document of considerable length where you tell the whole story, providing all the details of what you've done and what the outcomes were. This is the major assessable piece of work for the unit.

This page outlines the requirements for your final project report, which is the final written assignment in the unit.

Submission Requirements Final Project Report

The expected length of your report depends on whether you are doing an analysis or a development project: see the table further below.

This document should report in detail on (a) your initial problem specification; (b) relevant related work and background sources; (c) the approach you took to solving the problem; and (d) the outcomes of your work. The report should be provided as a PDF document.

The Aims of Final Project Report

This assignment has the following aims.

1. It allows you to demonstrate your ability to write an extended report of a significant piece of project work.
2. It provides an achievable presentation of all the details of your project for those who might want to take your work further or build upon it some way.
3. It provides you with a document that you can provide to others to demonstrate what you are capable of.

Final Project Report Format and Structure

Make sure your submission meets the following requirements.

1. Use formatting guidelines described on iLearn.
2. The length of your report depends on whether you are doing a management (i.e. analysis) or a IS/Networking/Security/Web Engineering (i.e. development) project. The table below suggests typical lengths for each situation, but note that these should be treated as indicative only: Your report needs to be long enough to describe in detail the work that you have done, but not so long that it discourages someone from reading it. Management Projects @40+ pages IS/Networking/Security/Web Engineering Projects @30 pages

   The shorter report length requirement for the latter projects is a consequence of the requirement for these projects also to deliver a working piece of software, which is to be demonstrated to the supervisor's satisfaction at the conclusion of the project.

3. The document should have a separate title page, and begin with an abstract or summary of 150-200 words in length that is able to stand alone as a concise and comprehensive description of your project's objectives, approach and outcomes. This may be the revised version of the Abstract you submitted previously.
4. The body of the document should consist of a series of numbered sections and subsections; the exact nature and content of these will depend on the specifics of your project, as will the proportion of the available space accorded to each. Typically you would have an introductory section that outlines the problem you are aiming to solve, and provides a road-map of the remainder of the document; this would then be followed by a background section that describes related work; then a number of sections which describe the work you have carried out, followed by a conclusions section which summarises what has been achieved, and what future work might be pursued. Most reports will have five or six sections in total.
5. Finally, you should have a consistently formatted reference list or bibliography that contains full details of all materials cited in your paper. Ensure that you follow appropriate conventions here.

Please ensure that your final report is submitted with a file-name that has the following format:

• ‹FamilyName_Givenname›_FinalReport.pdf

Assessment of Final Project Report

Your final report is worth 50 marks. These marks represent not only the written content of your report, but also the project work that underlies it.

Note that for management projects, the report should be more than a literature review, and should provide some real analytical content.

For IS/network/security/web engineering projects, a working demonstration of the constructed software will be a component of the marking. Please take note of the following requirements:

• A listing of your code should be provided as an appendix to your final report. If there is some reason why this is not feasible or practicable, you should discuss this with the unit convener no later than one week before the final report is due.
• You should arrange a time to demonstrate the software you have developed to your supervisor, so that he or she can take account of this when marking your work. This demonstration should preferably happen during the last week of semester, or in extreme cases during the week following the last week in semester, when the reports are being marked.

It is not necessary to demonstrate your software during your final presentation, although you may do so if you wish. Note that your supervisor will include an assessment of your software under the assessment attribute of 'Quality of Work Carried Out' in the rubric below, but your second marker will not be able to take your software into account, and so will be relying on the description in your final report to convey the quality of your work.

The final report will be assessed by your supervisor according to the following rubric: