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ML4Design

Group Assignment

Table of contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Tasks
  3. Deliverable

Introduction

In the preparation, tutorial, and individual assignment, we have used various tasks to guide you through the different steps you need to take to process large amounts of textual data and ultimately, gain valuable insights. In this group assignment, you will apply text processing techniques similar to the ones we used in the tutorial session in the context of the design brief you can see below. Keep in mind that the most significant part of this assignment is to reflect on the different choices you make. What parameters did you end up using and why? What challenges did you encounter in the process? What insights did you gain? Could you translate these insights into ideas to improve students’ well-being? If yes, what ideas are those and how are they connected to your analysis? If not, why not?

The Design brief
After you successfully managed to inform Delft University of Technology about the needs of the students during the COVID-era (Tutorial + Individual Assignments) they really liked your work and decided to assign a new, but similar, project to you: they now want to learn about the students’ ideas on how ​​TUD can improve the students’ wellbeing.
For this, you could use the same dataset once again, since it contains the replies of the students to the question “Do you have any ideas about how we can improve student Wellbeing?” ( the column named “students_sugg_to_improve_wellbeing”). Processing these answers seems very promising for you to gain insights regarding the inquiry of TUD.
brief
As before, this task needs to be done fast and efficiently. Use your newly acquired text-processing skills to analyze the collected data, reflect on the whole process, and, based on your findings, suggest ways to improve the student’s wellbeing in these difficult times.

Tasks

  1. Analyze the given text collection (to read students’ suggestions replace the “student_needs” with “students_sugg_to_improve_wellbeing”) to reveal the solutions students suggest to improve their wellbeing. You can use suggested tools like Voyant and the methods from Tutorial / Individual Assignment.
  2. Turn the results of your analysis into insights. What ideas do most students suggest? If you find several ideas, select a subset of them (2-5). Try to be as specific as possible about the description of these ideas and the method you used to identify them. Examples of details you can try to describe: What is the context of such ideas? What are the main components and the environment in which they could be applied? Clearly support how you identified these ideas. For example, discuss the method you used and the reason you selected this method, and/or show examples from the text that support your arguments.
  3. Suggest ways to transform the suggested solutions by the students into actual steps TUD could follow to implement them. Note that it is also possible that the currently collected answers do not provide enough information for you to make concrete suggestions to TU Delft. If that is the case explain why these answers are not enough and expand on how we could collect more data from the students and analyze it accordingly. Being as specific as possible about the students’ suggested solutions will allow you to easier accomplish this task.

Deliverable

  • Introduction (8-10 sentences)
    • Shortly present the context for the problem and the problem you aim to solve
    • Motivate why do you think this is an important problem to solve
    • Shortly describe your suggestions to TUD.
    • Shortly reflect on how the lives of students will change after your solution is implemented.
  • Text analysis
    • Describe how you processed and analyzed text collection:
      • What methods did you use?
      • What steps did you follow?
      • What are the most interesting findings in your analysis?
  • Students’ Input
    • Describe key insights you got from analyzing the text collection:
      • What are the main students’ suggestions you found during the text analysis?
      • How did you prioritize which suggestions to focus on?
      • Use examples from text collection to present and motivate your answers.
  • Solution description
    • What is your design solution based on the students’ input?
    • Why do you think this solution will work for this problem?
    • Optional: How could you detect your design solution in the future surveys of the students? What (in answers of students) would indicate the problem is solved? What (in answers of students) would indicate otherwise?
    • Use examples from text collection to motivate your solution
  • Conclusion (6-8 sentences)
    • Briefly describe your problem and solution
    • Reflect on limitations and ethical implications of your project
  • Team roles and work distribution
    • Describe the distributions of effort in the groups. Make sure that you keep track of this information. It is not acceptable to simply say “all members work together” or “all members contributed equally”. If there are any problems with collaboration, please inform the course coordinator as soon as possible.