Coordinator: Mr. Simon Boynton
Course Description
This one-semester, 6-credit communication course is for final-year students majoring in Computer Science / Financial Technology [BASc(FinTech)] / Data Science and Engineering. The focus of this course is on helping students to report on the progress of their Final Year or Capstone Project in an effective, professional manner in both written and oral communication. Topics include accessing, abstracting, analyzing, organizing and summarizing information; making effective grammatical and lexical choices; technical report writing, and technical presentations. Assessment is wholly by coursework.
Co-requisites:
COMP4801 Final Year Project [for BEng(CompSc) students only]
FITE4801 Project [for BASc(FinTech) students only]
COMP4501 Data Science in Discipline Project or COMP4502 Final Year Project [for BEng(DS&E) students only]
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, students should be able to:
- Produce informative, coherent and professionally structured technical writing for a specialist audience and related personnel
- Present technical information in a coherent, engaging, and professional manner for a specialist audience and related personnel through integrated spoken, visual, and technical communication
- Evaluate solutions to engineering problems and options available, and make convincing justifications and claims based on real-life disciplinary contexts
- Carry out self-directed communication enhancement through critically reflecting on presentation performance and identifying areas for improvement
- Develop digital fluency by engaging in responsible and sustainable digital practices
Strategies
- Videotaping of oral presentations is conducted to add a critical element of tension and to facilitate performance improvements through self-reflection.
- In most cases, students are asked to target a non-specialist audience, or a combination of specialist and non-specialist audience whose communication needs and limitations must be accommodated through the choice of content, vocabulary and register.
- Students are required to attend compulsory rehearsal(s) and workshop(s) to gain feedback from the teacher and peers for improvement before the assessments.
- Assigned readings and tasks are set for out-of-class and independent learning
Assessment Methods
(with breakdown of percentage weighting of the various methods)
- Project reports (55%)
- Oral Presentations (35%)
- Independent learning work (10%)