Merja Bauters, Hannu Markkanen & Liisa Benmergui
EVTEK, University of Applied Sciences, Finland
June 17, 2006

Course name: Term Project: Multimedia Product

Institution: EVTEK, University of Applied Sciences, Degree Programme in Media Engineering

Course instructors: Merja Bauters, Niilo Säämänen

Scope: The scenario is based on past experiences and is executed in spring 2007 with extended suggestions

No. of participants: 22 students

Target populations: Media Engineering Bachelor level of studies, second year students

Content areas/Disciplines: Producing multimedia product, Design methodology, Process management

Duration of the course: One term (two periods 8th of January - 15th of May 2007)

No. of instructional hours: 14 three hour group meetings with instructors

Additional background information
Term project, multimedia product is a second-year bachelor level course at Degree Programme in Media Engineering, EVTEK, University of Applied Sciences. The degree programme in media engineering offers 4 years study program in the area of engineering. Degree programme gives potential (1) to develop digital and graphical media concepts, (2) to manage production processes, (3) to work as a specialist and customer service provider as well as to work as an (4) independent entrepreneur of the field. All professional studies are divided into (A) compulsory studies, (B) optional studies and (C) elective studies, which initiate into (A) fundamental media technologies and (B) advanced special skill.

One of the important aspects of term project courses is that students collaborate in groups, producing real life products for real client. This is expected to stimulate students to be more aware of and reflect on their learning process.

Course description:
This course is one of the two term projects executed in the curriculum. The term projects aim to combine the learned skills and extend to real and authentic cases with real clients. By attending these term projects, students gradually build their knowledge and improve their skills in managing projects and dealing with real situations when designing a product or service for a client. The participants in this course consist of students completing their bachelor level studies in media engineering. The total amount of students ranges from 18 to 30 students depending on the year.

Goals
The goals of the course is to provide an opportunity for the students to use and extend their skills on the design of a multimedia product or service in an authentic situation, still being able to get support for the process. For instance, the course aims to enable the students use their knowledge of design methods and theories, usability and management approaches in new design situations with real clients. The students are facing realistic and complex problems, which they have to solve together with the members of their group. The results of this process are a product or service that is delivered to the client, as well as all the artefacts they students create together in the process. These artefacts consist of deliverables generally created in the product design process and other artefacts that mediate the process such as mock-ups, meeting memos, timetable etc. Ultimately, the course intends to support students to reflect the process in meta-level and understand the complex relation that exist between task and artefact.

Set-up
Work in the course is organized according to the principles of project-based education. This involves applying the knowledge and skills learned and exercised in a realistic and practice-oriented learning environment.
Thus, the course activities are executed according to a project model, including team creating, planning, reporting, shared tasks and collaboration. The deliverables the students produce are the project documents and the actual product that is taken into use by the client. The students are required to create independently the task needed to complete the multimedia product as well as to place their the dead lines to the deliverables. The students also divide their roles in the team themselves. Most often the following roles are found manager, designer, coder, and usability expert. The activities include face-to-face meetings/activities that are placed into university schedule. Two instructors are present to give advice and support on the work that is going on. The three hours take place every week all through the course. The students organise their own meetings and meetings with the client, as well as their own work in the team. The minutes of the meetings are reported into the Shared Space tool, which also support the teams’ reflection on the process and decisions.
All teams have a different project and client. The teams search the client themselves.

Narrative

Phase 1: Initiation/”organising the start”
The project initiation phase takes place at the beginning of the course. Students are provided a description and the requirements of the course as well as an overview to the design methods discussed in previous courses. After the starting description no lecturing is provided unless the students suggest a topic that they feel a need for.

Task 1.
Students are expected to form a team (of four students preferably) by themselves and decide how to search for a client.

Task 2.
The students start the search for the client. In cases no client is found EVTEK produces the missing projects for the course.
Examples of clients are: small companies in need for multimedia presentations of their company (CD/DVD), enhancing the company’s Internet site to be more interactive or updating and extending the database solutions of the company. The clients can also be music groups in need for a promotion DVD or music video or interactive multimedia products for Internet or in the form DVD to conferences and congresses for associations or institutes.

Task 3.The students are expected to decide the roles they take in the team/group (e.g. manager, designer, coder, etc), produce the synopsis of the product to be developed and create meeting memos of their meetings. Synopsis includes the GANTT, namely describing the envisioned tasks needed to complete the product or service as well as decide how long the tasks take, and who are responsible for the tasks and deliverables. The activities take place as face-to-face or virtual meetings. The produced deliverables and artefacts are uploaded into Shared Space. These are collaborative activities where the team members work together, synchronously/asynchronously, on writing, editing and redefining the deliverables and other artefacts.

Produced deliverables: meeting memos, synopsis with GANTT.

Supporting guidelines/templates: Synopsis guidelines, customer meeting guidelines

Phase 2: Planning
Planning phase is composed of complex tasks. Since the products are different, depending on the demand of the client, the teams have to organize their design activities according to the product or service’s and client’s demands.

The target group of the product or service has to be defined and described. The conclusion of the target group’s needs is various scenarios where the targets group, its needs and use in context are described. Furthermore the planning phase consists of the mock-up process in which the students are expected to visualise the possible interface and interaction of the end-users. The evaluation and testing of the mock-ups is included in this phase.

The following tasks are included in the planning phase.

Task 1.
For defining the target group and its needs and use, the students consult the client, search information of the potential target group from Internet, through similar products or services or by observing the users that represent the target group. They also describe the possible context (physical or social) where the use of the product or service occurs. The work can be divided between the team members or they can proceed on the search collaboratively.

Out of the abovementioned data the students write the user scenarios together.

Task 2.
The mock-up process requires that the students reflect on the user stories (scenarios) and often brainstorm to get an idea of the architecture of the product or service and of the visualisation of the interface and interaction of the product or service.

The first mock-ups can be produced separately by the members of the team (parallel design) or collaboratively. The mock-ups are expected to be presented to the customer for approval of the ideas as well as to be evaluated by heuristics or tested with the end-users. The mock-up process is iterative producing many versions. The students are expected to reflect on the design, testing results and decision made to understand how they have come up with the final version that is implemented.

Task 3.
Intertwined with the task 2. is the actual choice of the testing methods and justifying this choice of the testing methods used, as well as reporting of the results of the tests with a description of the design changes in the mock-up or architecture.

The results of the activities described in the aforementioned tasks are uploaded into the Shared Space and organised under the tasks that the students have created. These tasks might be exactly in the form that the tasks are here presented. For example, they might be separated to more than three tasks or they might be lumped up into one or two. It depends on the project in questions and the working manner that the team has created and agreed on. The students also expected to express the relations between the tasks and artefacts they have produced and uploaded into the Shared Space by using the linking properties and semantic categorising of the Shared Space.

Produced deliverables: Meeting memos, sketches of the mock-ups, testing plans, testing reports, report from the customer approval (or non-approval), scenarios, requirements specification.

Supporting guidelines/templates: Mock-up guideline, testing report guidelines, guidelines for writing scenarios and requirements specifications.

Phase 3: Execution
Phase execution is mainly composed of the actual implementation based on the material and testing of the different stages of the implementation.

The phase can be divided into two main tasks: Task 1. Obtaining the material from the client (or producing some of it) and implementing it; task 2. Executing many evaluations and correcting the implementation according to the test results. The tasks are intertwined.

Task1.
The students are expected to communicate with the client for acquiring the existing material and arranging it for the implementation. The task is complex, since it requires that the students have agreed on a mode of communication with the client, which requires customising of different social activities such as the team’s/group’s activities, the activities required by the institute and the client’s activities. Furthermore, the arranging of the material according to the agreed architecture and mock-up for implementing requires reflecting on the meta-level of the process, of the intended product or service and of the testing/evaluation plans made.

Task2.
The students are expected to create a testing plan, execute it, report the results of the testing and explain how the results affect the implementation. The process requires also that the students justify the changes they make for the mock-up design and implementation plan. This means that they have to reflect on how they have understood and interpreted the testing results and this affects the mock-up designs and implementation plan. The students have to produce also the specification document.

The process is iterative and collaborative.

Produced deliverables: Meeting memos, mock-ups and demo versions, testing plans, testing reports, report from the customer approval (or non-approval), specification document

Supporting guidelines/templates: Guideline for writing the specifications, testing plans, testing reports

Phase 4: Final evaluation/delivery
The students deliver the product or service to the customer. Sometimes they also execute the final evaluation in this phase, depending on the nature of the product or service and the part of the customer in the process.
The deliverable is a multimedia product such as: DVD, interactive internet service (site) or extended or updated database system.

In order to round off the course the teams give a final presentation that sums up their process, the difficulties and successes they had and present the designed product or service.
Discussion is open after each team’s presentation, so that students can pose questions and comments to each other when all are present.

Produced deliverables: Meeting memos, final report and final presentation, maintenance (up-dating) report of the product

Supporting guidelines/templates: Guideline for writing the maintenance report, final report and presentation

Other course activities

The instructors are available for face-to-face feedback sessions and discussion with the groups in every week’s three-hour time slot. During these three-hour time slots, instructors give discuss with the teams and, if needed, give advice to the challenges or problems the teams meet.
The student teams have their own independent face-to-face meetings or virtual meetings. In these meetings the responsibilities, dead-lines, and other tasks of process and its arrangement are discussed.
The students are advised to reflect on their activities either on their own meeting or on the weekly three-hour slots. Critical features/Requirements

Critical features/Requirements

Non-technical

• The course set-up follows project-based learning and the requirements of the course are explained to the students;
• The instructors are expected to provide support, advice and feedback on students’ work;
• The clients provide authentic needs and context for the students;
  Visualisation of the process, tasks and artefacts and their relations.

Technical

• The tool that enables the visualisation of the process, tasks and artefacts and gives an opportunity for students to express the relationships of the tasks, and artefacts as well as help the students to categorise the tasks and artefacts;
• The tool should support and promote collaborative work;
  The system should enable easy communication means between team members (chat / Wiki);
• The tools should provide possibility to see the history and evolvement of the task and artefact;
• The tools should work in different browsers and operating system as well as outside of the institute network;
• The tools should provide means to express the status of the artefacts such as: idea, draft, in process, final Support of private areas and shared areas should be present; with an overview of who is active at the moment;
• The tool should provide means to collaboratively write the deliverables and add, redefine and correct them easily without the fuss of uploading, downloading, versioning etc.

Rationale

Knowledge creation
Within the present course, the knowledge creation is intertwined with the product process. Collaborative knowledge creation occurs (should occur) when the team is working together on the different artefacts related to the end product. For instance, the mock-up process requires designing together and reflecting on the design choices, taking into account the end-users’ and the client’s needs. Furthermore the mock-up process is iterative. Therefore, the re-use of earlier versions and designing choices becomes important. The designing of the product is a combination of existing and new knowledge. Knowledge creation features can be found in the design process itself; for example, when reflecting on the manner the team works, if they meet the deadlines they have placed for different tasks and if their communication plan between the team members and the client works as they envisioned.

Collaboration and reflection
In the course there exist many features that should promote collaboration and reflection. For example, the finding of the client should occur together, the writing of the deliverables, the designing of the mock-ups and testing plans as well as the planning of the process itself. All of the former require making decisions together or al least agreeing on the decisions together. The collaborative and reflective aspects come forwards in the justification the students have to make for their design choices and process. management.

Work around shared objects
The course setting holds several artefacts that provide possibilities for working together on shared artefacts. For instance, shared artefacts can be the deliverables, mock-up and demonstration versions of the product, planning of the process by creating the necessary tasks and indicating the relations between the tasks and artefacts created as well as planning, executing and reporting of the testing. For instance, the meeting memos, mock-up versions, testing results have to be reflected together to agree on the further design steps and production process steps.

Authentic setting
The teams have real clients, which they have to meet and with which they have to communicate. The actual product the teams create is a real product that the client should take into real use. Therefore the team are continuously faced with real situations, for example with fuzzy and complex explanations from the client’s side of the needs of the product or service or with the often-occurring problems of material delivery from the client’s part. The client assesses the quality of the product or service and the real end-users provide feedback on the use of the product or service. In this way, students experience the demands of the real life in multimedia production and acquire experiences of actual situations and of the validity of their decisions in the situation, which they can re-use later.

Related tools, artefacts, and activities

Tools

• Shared Space enabling uploading and working together with the artefacts and process itself. It should enable collaborative work, relation indication between the artefacts and tasks as well as modify the process. For example, change dead lines of tasks or change responsibilities between the team members and re-use artefact for iterations.
• Synchronous/asynchronous work on deliverables (Wiki). It provides means for the students to work together on the writing, redefining and changing of the deliverables. gives students the opportunity to work together at the same text
• Different kinds of communication tools, e.g. chat, virtual conferencing
• Different kind of awareness tools for keeping track of who has been working on which artefacts (or is working) and for retrieving information on the changed content in the artefacts.

Artefacts

Main deliverables:

• Synopsis with GANTT
• Scenarios
• Mock-ups
• Testing plans
• Testing reports
• Requirements specification
• Specification document
• The product of service
• Maintenance report
• Final report
• Final presentation

Other artefacts:

• Meeting memos
• Customer approvals
• Material for the product or service
• Sketches for the architecture and mock-ups
• Reflection notes

Activities

Activities related to the process:

• Collecting example of the end-users, their needs and the context of use
• Different version of edited texts
• Collecting examples of different architectural models and design of similar products than the one to be produced and coding examples

Activities related to the people:

• Work together with the team mates
• Reflect on the collaborative activities and decision
• Communication with the client

Experiences
The course is running quite well. Most of the students are involved and excited to create a real product of service. However, there is a need to enable better visualisation of the relations and means for exercising more collaborative work.