B336 Assignment 2

B336 Advanced Internet Computing

Assignment 2

Title:

"This University is ____________!!!!"

Hypothetical Scenario:

The government's Department for Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DETYA) is embarking on a strategic plan to improve the competitveness and effectiveness of university and tertiary teaching in Australia. As in any exercise in improving competitiveness and efficiency, half the battle is in getting the appropriate information to the appropriate people.

One of the key problems identified by DETYA is the fact that there is no easy, consistent and reliable way to:

compare the structure and content of similar units and programmes across different institutions

obtain feedback and information from students, educators and administrators who are currently participating in the programmes at the different institutions.

To overcome this, DETYA is requesting proposal from software developers to design and implement an Internet-based information system that will be able to solve the above two problems.

The information system should not only make it easy to gather the required information, but also to allow easy access to the information. The personnel who will potentially be using the information are:

Potential students and their parents wishing to to evaluate tertiary institutions and programmes

Current students who are considering futures units, or changing programmes, or even enrolling in another institution.

Educators (lecturers, tutors, etc) wishing to improve their courses.

DETYA staff wanting to evaluate the quality of different courses and institutions.

One of the key obstacles will be the availability and intellectual property of course material, which institutions will be unwilling to share without compensation, especially with competing institutions. The only information which we can rely on that the institutions will share (willingly!) are those which are already publish publicly, such as in university handbooks. This does not mean DETYA cannot change its policies on what information should to be made public, but they would be cautious of any changes which the institutions will oppose vigorously.

At the stage of requesting the proposals, DETYA have not specified what information and data needs to be collected and made available, nor have they specified how that information are to be collected and made available. Those would be left to the individual proposals to determine.

You are a professional software developer (or a team of developers) who concentrates on providing Internet and web-based solutions. You wish to go into the area of education. You see this proposal as an opportunity to get a project with DETYA which could be very lucrative in the long term. Therefore, you decide to put forward a proposal for this project.

Submission Requirements:

You must submit the following :

A proposal document addressed to DETYA outlining your design for the system they require, including

The architecture of the whole system - this should describe how the various components interact, including the software, equipment, and personnel (students, educators, administrators, DETYA, technical staff, etc)

What resources your project team will need to implement the system.

The expected personnel required to maintain this system.

The expected software and equipment required by the system - the ones that needs to be developed, and the ones which are already available.

Prototype programs and scripts for parts of your proposed system, to give the evaluators an idea how your system will work.

Source code for all programs and scripts - either on disk, available online, or as printouts.

(For groups only) A list showing which group member implemented which piece of software.

Assessment Criteria:

Your submission will be evaluated based on the following criteria (the weight of each component is given in brackets):

How well your design meets the DETYA aims. (20%)

How much resource (personnel, equipment and time) is required to implement and maintain your system - the less the better. (5%)

How well your prototype(s) shows what your system can do. (5%)

How well your prototype(s) work. (30%)

The readability and managability of your source code. (5%)

The quality of your documentation. (5%)

Evidence of the depth and/or breath in your understanding of Internet technologies. (30%)

Although the quality of documentation (criteria 6) is only 5%, keep in mind that if your documentation is weak, your assessor will have less understanding of your system and therefore be less able to give marks for the other criteria.

Criteria 7 is evaluated based on your design and your prototypes. It must demonstrate at least the understanding of the material given in lectures on web services and XML. You are encouraged to improve your system by exploring other technologies, and you will be rewarded for including and implementing them, UNLESS:

The technologies were taught in units which you have previously completed (such as B211) or are currently enrolled in.

The technologies are not Internet-based.

You will however receive minor marks for have a better system overall by including the technologies in (a) and (b).

Also for criteria 7, you may choose to have depth by go very deeply into one technology (eg. one aspect of XML), or you may choose to have breath by exploring many technologies. The results from either approach will be rewarded equally.

Learning Objectives:

As with all assignments, the assessment criteria is directly correlated with the unit's learning objectives. For each of the criterion above, the more you show that you have achieved the unit's learning objectives, the better you will score in that criterion.

The precise correlation between the assessment criteria above and the unit's learning objectives are:

Assessment Criteria 1: Learning Objectives 1, 3, 4.
Assessment Criteria 2: Learning Objectives 1, 3, 4.
Assessment Criteria 3: Learning Objectives 2.
Assessment Criteria 4: Learning Objectives 2.
Assessment Criteria 5: Learning Objectives 2.
Assessment Criteria 6: Learning Objectives 1, 3.
Assessment Criteria 7: Learning Objectives 1, 4.

To score full marks for the assessment criteria which is related to learning objective 4, you are expected to gather material outside of the course content or more in depth than that which is presented in the lectures and labs.

Project Group:

This assignment may be completed by an individual, but you may choose to do it as a project group. The maximum group size is 4 members. You do not need to notify the unit coordinator or your tutor about your group formation. Marks will be allocated according to the name(s) that appear on the cover sheet that accompanies the assignment submission.

As an individual, you are expected to only produce a basic design, and a prototype for perhaps only one compnent of your system. As a group, the required the quality in design and amount of prototypes will increase in proportion to the number of group members. The group and individual components of the assessment criteria is allocated as follows:

Criteria 1: Group (everyone in the group will get exactly the same mark)
Criteria 2: Group
Criteria 3: Individual (marks for each individual's work given separately)
Criteria 4: Individual
Criteria 5: Individual
Criteria 6: Group
Criteria 7: half from Group, half from Individual

The aim of this breakdown is so that the design of the system and the documentation is mainly group work, but the writing of the prototypes is mainly individual work. Although in real projects, collaborations even at the implementation level are common, this units still needs to assess whether individual students have acquired good implementation skills. It is for this reason the prototypes are assessed as individual submissions. Groups must submit a list clearly indicating the contributions of each member in regards to the prototypes submitted.

If you would like to do this assignment as a group but do not have anyone specific in mind to form a group, then you may recruit your team using the unit's discussion forum. The recruitment process will be of your own control, and the unit coordinator will not get involved in allocating students to groups (mainly because the unit coordinator is sick and tired of administration).