Module

Handbook
2021/22

6500CSQR PROJECT

Oryx Universal College

1
 Contents
Teaching Staff ................................................................................................................................................................. 3
Syllabus ............................................................................................................................................................................. 4
Topic Selection……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..5
Key Dates……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………5
Ethical Approval…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...6
Assessment…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………10
References/Book List………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..11

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Teaching Staff

The module is delivered by: Prof Ali Jaoua, ali@oryxuni.com Dr Ouarda Bettaz-Nehab, ouarda@oryxuni.com
Dr Saleem Ahmed saleem@oryxuni.com and Aboubakr Aqle a.aqle@oryxuni.com

Contacting the Tutors

Each tutor will provide details on request of their own availability based upon timetable commitments.
Arranging supervision sessions with your supervisor is your responsibility but be aware that they will be
monitored and if you do not consult on a regular basis you will lose marks for that section see table 1 on page
6. Tutors may be contacted via the email address provided. You must remember to use only your Oryx
Universal College e-mail address, if you use any other e-mail address your e-mail will not be acknowledged.
E-mail provides a good means of communication and allows individual appointments to be made if necessary.
We will endeavour to reply to your email within 3 working days, normal working hours are 9.00am to 5.00pm
on Sunday to Thursday.

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Syllabus

1. Introduction

Your project is a 40-credit module and one of the most important components of your final year and thus
one of the most important parts of your whole degree. It is an individual piece of work directed and
monitored by a member of the academic staff, your project supervisor. An important point to understand
about projects and project supervision from the outset is that you are responsible for your project and its
progress. Your supervisor provides help and guidance, but you are the ‘Project Manager’, the ultimate
responsibility for delivering the project rests with you.

This module aims:

1. To enable the student to use rigorous development or scientific methods to produce an artefact relevant
to their programme of study.
2. To present results both orally and as a written report.

Learning Outcomes

After studying this module, you should be able to:

1. Analyse the research in the chosen area and prepare a literature review.
2. Design and develop a solution to a chosen problem.
3. Critically evaluate the artefact produced.

2. Choosing a Project

You are encouraged to propose a project idea of your own within the general areas indicated by members
of staff, and that is relevant to your programme of study. It is important that there is some member of staff
who can give reasonable guidance in the area chosen. If you are in any doubt about this, contact your
tutors. To propose a project, you should first work out a project idea and then discuss it with potential
supervisors of relevant academic interests as soon as possible. Having reached agreement with a potential
supervisor, you should provide a project outline, no more than one A4 page, of what you want to do.

You must return the ‘Project Proposal Form.’ On CANVAS to your project supervisor by 25th February 2021.
Every supervisor has a limited allocation for Project supervision and while every effort will be made to match
you with your preferred supervisor this cannot be guaranteed.

When you are proposing a possible Project, please bear in mind that a final year Project should include
significant academic content, which is relevant to your programme of study. You will be required to work
on a problem which demonstrates your ability to address, in a coherent and sensible manner, a
challenging academic issue of comparable difficulty to your other FHEQ Level 6 academic work.

One area in which we need to be particularly careful is that of externally defined projects, such as projects
with the company in which a student is employed. Whilst it may well be a potentially valuable learning
experience, the simple fact that a project is of use to an external agency is clearly insufficient in itself for a
satisfactory final year Project. There is a danger that the commercial, or other, imperatives of the externally

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 defined project will lead to a Project which is a "job well done" in the collaborative organisations terms but
which does not contain sufficient academic challenge.

This should not discourage you from trying to define such a Project, but you should be aware that when
the Project is marked, it will be assessed as a part of your final year work. It is perfectly possible to define a
satisfactory Project in these circumstances, but you should discuss these issues carefully with your supervisor.
The Projects will be assessed on a case by case basis but the fact that the major aim of a Project is
academic and educational must not be lost.

Please note that any arrangement entered into by individual members of staff and students prior to the
start of Semester 2 2021 should be regarded as provisional. Arrangements will be finalised subject to
resource availability and will only be confirmed when the requisite documentation is signed BY BOTH
STUDENT AND SUPERVISOR.

3. Starting the Project

After the start of teaching w/c 7th February 2021 you should arrange to meet your supervisor as soon as
possible AFTER the Introduction lecture (see table 2). At this preliminary meeting, you will finalise a project
idea, and set up regular appointments, with your supervisor. You are to submit to your supervisor a draft
specification for review by 25th February 2021.

This document should give a title, module code and an outline description of the project, and summarise
the work to be done. As a minimum requirement each of the following topics must be satisfactorily covered.

• Subjects to be studied
• A brief description of the background
• Problems to be addressed
• Aims, milestones and initial ideas
• Software and hardware constraints
• An outline plan of action and a timetable
A template for the specification is provided on Canvas.

Upon submission of the Project Specification the supervisor will use the following criteria to decide whether
or not the project be allowed to proceed further.

• The title is consistent with the supervisor’s understanding of the project

• The proposed aims of the project are worthy of a final year project
• The outline plan of action and the timetable are feasible for the student to implement

Upon approval the supervisor and the student must sign the Project Specification, which is then submitted
via CANVAS 11th March 2021.

Minor changes in the direction of a project are inevitable and should normally cause no concern. Major
changes to your project idea should be avoided where possible and must be discussed and approved by
your supervisor. A revised project specification should be sent to the Project Tutor. Do not assume your
brilliant new idea is as good as you think of it. And do not assume your worry about your proposed idea is
suddenly terrible because you can’t see a way forward. Discuss it!

4. Work Plan

The project will run from February 2021 to December 2021. This period may seem like a long time but is
actually a short period of time to produce the significant piece of work which is your project. Consider the
competition for your time from all your other work that your project will be under. The time you will be able
to allocate for your project will be limited. It is vital that you work steadily at your project over the year.

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 There is great temptation to feel that you can leave your project work until later. Doing this will inevitably
cause grave problems which it is unlikely you will be able to overcome in the time available to you. Start
on top of your project, stay on top of it and finish on top of it! Always remember that your project is a large
slice of the marks that are available to you in your final year and thus represents a major contributing
component to your final degree classification.

You should aim to complete the technical work by the middle of the second semester. The rest of the
second semester until the deadline should be devoted to writing up the project in your final report. During
the period of the project you should allocate around one and a half days per week to your project. It
cannot be emphasised enough how important it is that this time is well used!

Remember your project carries 33.3% of the total final year credits – do not neglect it in favour of other
coursework.

5. Project Management

A record of your progress should be kept during the project which is assessed in every mark scheme as
Project Management and is worth 10% of your final mark.

At the end of each month of the project you will fill in a monthly progress report and discuss your overall
progress with your supervisor. This document will be available via Canvas shortly after your studies begin,
you will be required to complete this document and send it to your supervisor BEFORE your monthly
meetings. This document needs to be signed by you and your supervisor and will form part of the
documentation to be included in your final project report

Evidence of the regular meeting and report submission must be evidenced in your final report, which will
be assessed!

The better informed the supervisor is by the student the better will be the advice and guidance which they
have to offer. A student who only feeds back comments of the form “Well I suppose it’s going OK thanks ...”
to their supervisor is providing them with precious little information upon which they can provide much
needed input to the project.

6. Project Assessment

Marks for the project break down as follows: table 1 marking criteria

Content Mark
Final Project Report 80%
Project Management 10%
Oral Presentation 10%
7. Presentation (Mandatory)

You will be given a 10-minute time slot to describe your project. The presentation is an opportunity to tell
an audience (normally your supervisor, moderator, plus 3-4 other students in your session) about your
project. Typically, you will support your talk with PowerPoint slides, but you can use any of the audio-visual
tools found in a classroom. At the end of your presentation you will be asked questions to defend your work.

The presentations will be scheduled for December 2021, and you will be notified of your time slot closer to
that date.

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 7.1. Tips for Preparing Slides

The principal use of slides to the audience is to help it assimilate the talk by presenting in a visual format
each key point and concept.

The principal use of slides to the speaker is to serve as their notes for the talk. To use in addition either cue
cards or written notes gives an impression of lack of confidence to the audience. Ironically, using cue cards
or notes in addition to slides can make the talk more difficult as the former have to be synchronised with
the latter.

It is a common misconception among students that a high density of information upon each slide will
impress the audience. Actually, the audience may become disinterested if it cannot digest one slide after
another. An audience is only impressed by slides it can understand, slides that contain only key words,
phrases, pictures and diagrams essential to the talk.

7.2. Assessment

The presentation is an exercise in communication, persuasion, information delivery and demonstrating

competent management of a project. The proportion of overall project marks for the presentation is 10%.
Marks will be awarded for the quality of the presentation. A detailed and tedious description of the
technical minutiae of your work will be marked lower than an interesting discussion of how your project has
developed, the interesting problems you looked at and how you might develop the work further.
Assessment will be made against the following criteria.

• Visual aids: clarity of layout, explanation, use and handling.

• Delivery: clarity, linguistic structure, appropriate vocabulary, rhythm and intonation of speech, speed
of delivery, use of pauses, enthusiasm and interest of speaker and appropriate body language
including eye contact.

• Technical/academic content: clarity of the technical and academic aspects of the project work. Is
the work presented rigorous, challenging, scientific etc.

• Questions: clarity and conciseness of response, appropriate use of examples, response to alternative
ideas, manner and conviction of response.

8. Final Project Report

This document is a comprehensive and self-contained report on the work done on the project. It is
important to note that 80% of the marks are allocated to the Final Project Report. Your report is thus very
important. In particular, whilst your supervisor will know what a good job you have done during the year,
the moderator(s) and external examiner of your project will only have your report with which to work.

Do not leave your report writing until the last minute. A hastily written report will not reflect well on your work
and will mean that however good your technical work the marks you receive will be significantly fewer
than they might otherwise be. As with all aspects of your project you should allocate time for writing up
and make sure you stick to your plans. A good approach is to have a logbook during the year so that when
you come to the time for completing your report you have a body of work on which to draw.

8.1 Conventions

The Final Report is a valuable document for inspection by appraisers and future cohorts of students. To
facilitate such inspection, it is necessary to impose a few conventions upon all reports.

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The Final Report should consist of a main text of around 20,000 words together with appendices when
appropriate. This is not a prescriptive word count, and you should take advice from your supervisor as to what
is best for your report. It is difficult to be more specific about the number of words as some subjects will lead
to more verbose reports than the others. Whatever the case it should be just the right length needed to fully
document the project without unnecessary verbosity. The main text should be arranged as a set of well-
defined chapters. In order to ease the reader’s access to the Report all source code, manual entries,
manufacture’s data, etc. should be relegated to the appendices. Such detail must not be allowed to obscure
or distract from the important arguments and messages of the main text.

Although the subject area of a project will dictate some of the structure of the report (e.g. analysis,
specification, design), each Final Report must contain the following:

• On the cover page; Title, Author, Programme, Module Code, Student Number, Supervisor and Year
of Study (2020-2021).

• An Abstract of not more than 250 words or one page. Though it is placed at the beginning of the
report, it is written after the main body of the report, which it summarises, has been completed. It gives
the potential reader a framework showing the main features of each section of the report, including
the problem, the solution, results and main conclusions reached. It is therefore both self-contained and
self-explanatory.

• The report should have a Contents Page listing, by Chapter and Section, the logical structure of the
report.

• The report should contain an Acknowledgements section. Here the student must make full
declaration of all contributions made by others to the project as, unless stated, the project is assumed
to be entirely the student’s own work. This would typically include the emotional support and
encouragement of family, friends and academic staff.

• The report should have Introductory, Background and Motivational material early on. This may
include discussion of the subject area and its background, a literature survey and some reference to
course material that relates to the project or, if appropriate, that the material discussed in the project
is entirely novel and what is the closest course material to it. It should also include a short discussion on
any ethical issues associated with your Project/report. The Research Ethical Approval Form, with
Participation Information Sheet and Consent Form where applicable, must be submitted on or before
the date shown in table 1.

• The report should have one or more chapters describing design and development of the project
solution. These may include formulation of scientific questions and the answers to them, appropriate
theoretical background, technical problems considered, methods used to solve them (methodologies
and tools employed e.g. case tools), discussion of issues arising in specifying, designing and
implementing the system (e.g. requirements analysis, user interface, system architecture, algorithms,
major data structure, etc.) and evaluation of results (e.g. complexity, efficiency, user-friendliness,
reliability, etc.).

• The report should have an appendix section on Project Management. This section will contain
monthly and weekly reports, and progress charts against the projected timescales.

• The report should have a section to contain the Conclusions, this being summary discussion/critique
of the project’s goals, achievements, difficulties, lessons learnt, etc. Similarly, there should be a section
on Further Work for the project, this being a discussion on how the work in the project could be further
continued and directed. A dead-end project with no possibility for further development is not a good

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 one. Suggestions for how future projects could develop the current theme would be a good way of
describing further work.

• The project must be conducted in the context of related work, and so the Report should contain a
section for References to such work. The main text will refer to such work, explain both its relevance
and how it has affected the course of the project. Make sure that all of the references listed are
actually referred to in the main text. Note that it is usually the work which others have or have not done
which motivates and justifies the project.

There are many styles for referencing, the most well-known being Harvard referencing and Oryx require the
use of accurate Harvard referencing throughout your report.

8. 2. Style

The report must be submitted in digital form, either Word or PDF format. Page size should be set to A4. The
principal font size should be 12 and use a common font such as Arial or Calibri. Line spacing of 1.5 should
be used.

8. 3. Assessment

The Final Report will be marked by the supervisor and the moderator. There are three different marking
schemes, depending on the type of project you are working on, but generally assessment will be made
against the following criteria.

• Overall quality of presentation: conformance to report-writing standards, spelling, grammar, punctuation

and ease of reading.

• Analysis of the problem domain: level of detailed knowledge, use of analysis method, use of abstraction
and creativity, evaluation and statement of specification of problem.

• Proposal of a suitable solution: depth of treatment, synthesis, creativity, use of methods and evaluation.

• Effective use of suitable tools/techniques: appropriate use of one or more of the following to support
the analysis and design methods and, if appropriate, the implementation of mathematical techniques,
statistical techniques, packages and development tools.

• Testing or Feedback: development of criteria, development strategy, critical review of evidences,

evaluation of significance, identification and resolution of contradictions.

• Conclusions: critical review against specification, recommendations and their support, proposals for
future development.

• Effective use of references: comprehensive coverage of domain, use of material in the report,
evaluation/critique, up to date and/or relevant. (note: references may include papers, manuals,
commercial documents and other relevant evidence)

8. 4. Submission Procedure

You must submit your project electronically via CANVAS. Your submission should include ALL of the material
that you wish to be assessed.

The submission deadline via CANVAS for your project is: Thursday 18th November 2021 - 5pm

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 A late submission is technically a failure and will prevent the award of an honour’s degree. If you find
difficulty in meeting the deadline, it is vital that you consult your supervisor or the project tutor at the earliest
possible opportunity and before the deadline.

9. Key Project Deliverables (table 1)

Content Deadline
Introductory Lecture 8th February 2021
16.000 – 17.00
Signed Project Proposal Form to the Project 25th February 2021
Tutor (Hardcopy)
Project Specification to the Supervisor 11th March 2021
Signed Project Specification uploaded to 1st April 2021
CANVAS
Final Agreed Ethics forms (uploaded to 11th March 2021
CANVAS)
Project Presentation December 2021
Final Project Report (CANVAS Upload) Thursday 18th November
2021

9. Final Advice

Have fun. This may seem a strange thing to say after all the dire predictions of doom that are contained in
this note, but you should have few problems, provided you work sensibly and in an organised way. The
project is a chance for you to work on something that interests you; take the opportunity to enjoy the work.
Plan out carefully what you intended to do and constantly review your progress against your original plan,
updating it when necessary.

10. Plagiarism

This project must be your own unaided work and as such you must maintain the highest standards of
personal integrity. The university has an established policy on academic honesty and takes a serious view of
collusion, plagiarism and cheating. Any student suspected of submitting a dissertation which is not their own
unaided work will be subjected to the full investigative procedures set down by OUC/LJMU. If you have
been found to have acted in an inappropriate manner you could risk having penalties imposed on your
work that would prevent you from receiving your degree.

All Projects require you to search existing literature. It is a mark of strength, not weakness, that all sources of
statements and information are acknowledged. Referencing must be Harvard. Quotations which are 'lifted'
without being attributed will be considered as examples of plagiarism and treated accordingly.

Any instance of plagiarism, be it deliberate or inadvertent (in that it occurs as a result of poor referencing
when writing up notes) will be taken seriously and will result in the appropriate penalties being applied.

In your research you will be drawing on a wide range of published material and possibly ideas and
information from other unpublished sources such as material found on the internet. This is acceptable but
must be acknowledged and referenced appropriately.

It must be clear from the project how you have carried out your research. You must therefore provide
evidence that confirms that the statistics and/or interview results included in your project are genuine and

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 original to yourself. The invention of statistics or interview results will be regarded as cheating and treated
accordingly.

Regular meetings and liaison with your supervisor throughout the project process will ensure that your
supervisor in aware of what you are doing and help you to avoid inadvertent plagiarism.

References/Book List
Gray, David E. (2014). Doing research in the real world (Third edition.). London: SAGE Publications.
No eBook available

Creswell, John W. (2014). Research design : qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (4th
ed.). Thousand Oaks ; London: SAGE.
No eBook available

Blaxter, Loraine, Hughes, Christina, & Tight, Malcolm. (2010). How to research (4th ed.). Maidenhead: Open
University Press.
No eBook available

Greetham, Bryan. (2014). How to write your undergraduate dissertation (Second edition.). Basingstoke,
Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.
eBook available

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