I’m a lecturer in education technology
and a tutor in computing
in distance learning education.
Students will do a number
of smaller projects during
a qualification like a degree, but
towards the end they
very often will do a large
individual project,
and this will involve
them independently doing
a piece of work,
with the support
of a supervisor or tutor
to help them along the way.
You need to be guided
by your tutor or supervisor
in making those choices
because we want it
to be a good project.
But there is a lot of individual scope
for you to choose something
you’re interested in.
At undergraduate level
the length of the project
is normally six to nine months
and three hundred
to six hundred hours of work.
So every project will start
with producing a proposal
and you’d want
to get this agreed
with your tutor or supervisor
to make sure it’s suitable.
You then move on to doing quite
a lot of research around the area,
make sure you know
what you’re going to do and what
information you need;
obviously then you’ll be moving
on to planning the project
and then delivering it.
Towards the end,
you’ll have to make sure
you spend a substantial
amount of time writing things up.
They’ve got to maintain contact
with their tutor in different ways.
So you might have
to email them,
or talk to them on the phone
and get used to doing
that regularly.
That’s obviously important
to keeping you on track.
Projects can be challenging
for non-native speakers,
particularly if they need to do
a lot of research,
which is written work,
so they need to improve
their ability to read
a lot of documents.
So those are skills
they should be developing
as they go through their qualification.
One is that
it allows them to pursue something they’re
really interested in, so they should
be building on
the advanced topics of study
they’ve learned as they’ve
gone through their qualification.
It teaches people
project management
and time management skills,
and a lot of those
would be important
in professional jobs.
If you were going for an interview
or applying for a job
you might have a piece of research,
a product
or something you’ve designed
that you can actually
show those people
and it will be a
substantial piece of work.
Go the distance.
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