Summary of group projects

Groups

Four to five students
Deliberate mix of engineering, MBA, and SIMS students
Your initial group makeup will be chosen by the instructor to meet the goal of mixing fields and interests based on the initial course survey. Pairwise exchanges among groups are permitted, as long as they are between students with similar backgrounds (both MBA students, both EECS students, both SIMS students, both non-EECS engineering students). Inform the instructor of any changes.
If any students drop the course, the instructors may have to ask students to move to maintain balance. To minimize this, groups will not be formed initially until the second week of class.

Due dates

The due date and time for projects are noted on the class calendar. Projects will be accepted within one week of the due date and time for 50% credit.

Project grading

The group will post a single project report on the course homepages by the due date and time. The instructors will both grade the project and merge their grades. All members in each group will receive the same grade for the project. At the end of the course, each student will be asked to rate the overall participation (quantity and quality) of the other group members, and this will be used to form a small component of each individual student's grade.

Projects summary

There will be three projects:

First project: Evaluation of a product or industry segment or company in terms of the concepts from the course. [details]
Second project: This will be a short project (more like a group homework assignment) that works on a classification problem in e-commerce. [details]
Third project: Consideration of both sides of a controversial issue, including a class debate. Two groups will address each issue, taking the two sides. [details]

Note that the projects are not sequential -- you can work on two or even all three projects concurrently -- although the milestone deadlines are phased.

Group organization

Each project group should designate two people for each project (it is a good idea to rotate these responsibilities):

A group leader, who will coordinate the group, set up meetings, lead group discussions, etc.
A group webmaster, who will the responsibility for gathering written inputs, soliciting comments, and formating and posting the final report.

Web support

The class homepages have several facilities that should be helpful.

You will have a private discussion group within the class discussion forum. This can be used for collaboration, where all the discussion is automatically archived and available to all group members.
You can use the private email system provided by the class, or your general email addresses, at your option.
Your group will post your homepages within the class pages, where all students in the class will be able to read them.