The caffeinated engineer
FAQ - Topic Choice
- “I have visitor access to Moodle (with the visitor password) but cannot register in any groups or submit any works. What to do?”
- “I do not have access to Moodle. How can I register in a group?”
- “I still do not have a group. What do I do?”
- “I was not registered in the course and all my colleagues are now part of groups. They already submitted their practical work topics! How to proceed?”
- “Can I switch from the even number to the odd-number class schedule?”
- Questions regarding topic choices
There have been some issues regarding the registration of the students in SIGARRA+Moodle, and also regarding the impact that these issues can have on the formation of the groups for the practical work.
Given the number of emails, I decided to prepare a summary of the most frequently asked questions here. Some emails about the topics themselves are also answered.
“I have visitor access to Moodle (with the visitor password) but cannot register in any groups or submit any works. What to do?”
Visitor mode can give you access to the course contents, but you will not be able to join a group on moodle or submit works until you are actually registered in moodle. Contact the academic services to fix your registration first (you should appear in the students list in SIGARRA) and then Moodle should update automatically giving you your own account there.
Only after you have a proper moodle account (not visitor) will you be able to join groups, submit works and do the final exam.
“I do not have access to Moodle. How can I register in a group?”
Moodle periodically imports the student registrations from SIGARRA, and there is no way for the professors to register a student manually. However, if you are registered in the UC and appear in its SIGARRA student listing but cannot log in to Moodle, it can be a temporary problem until the import is performed again. In these cases, you can contact the elearning staff at elearning@uporto.pt and explain the situation (put the professors in CC).
If you do not appear in the list of students of the course, please contact the DEEC secretariat or the Academic Services of FEUP to see if they can expedite your registration in the course. You may mention that, while access to moodle via the visitor mode can give you access to the course contents, you will not be able to join a group on moodle or submit works until the situation is solved. Professors can only provide access to the visitor mode.
To request visitor access to moodle, contact the course professors.
If the situation is not solved because of technical problems until a date of submission of a work, please ask your group colleagues that have access to Moodle to clearly specify in the first page of the work or in the website README the full name, email and student number of all members of the group. We will manually give the grade to everyone involved when we make the final gradings spreadsheets.
“I still do not have a group. What do I do?”
If you are still without a group for the practical work, please send a message to your colleagues via Dynamic Email (on SIGARRA) to determine if anyone is in the same situation. If no students are available to pair up with you, the professor will assign you randomly.
Until the submission of the topics for the practical work, if there is more than one group of 3 and the students do not agree on a split themselves, the professors will break them up randomly until a maximum of one group of 3 remains.
“I was not registered in the course and all my colleagues are now part of groups. They already submitted their practical work topics! How to proceed?”
After the submission of the group topics, every group will be committed to a topic and it makes little sense to break them apart (due to the limit of 2 and a maximum of 1 group of 3 in the course) after they effectively started working on that topic.
In these (hopefully) rare cases of students that join the course very late, we will open new groups of 2 for them and allow an additional group of 3 in the course, if there is an odd number of these late students.
If there is only 1 student in this situation, they will be allowed to work individually (with a topic of their choice) or join an existing group of 2 (adopting their topic). This can lead to more than one group of 3, breaking the initial rules, but we see no other sensible alternative.
“Can I switch from the even number to the odd-number class schedule?”
We are closely monitoring the student attendance in the practical classes and comparing it to the maximum COVID-capacity of the rooms. If you have a pressing reason for changing schedule, we may accept it and allow you to attend the opposite schedule, but be mindful of this:
- The COVID-capacity of the rooms is to be respected at ALL times
- If you attend the other schedule and the capacity is exceeded, you will be invited to exit the classroom and attend remotely, possibly at the library
- The situation can be reversed at any time
- We will record everyone’s attendance in Moodle in every practical class, regardless of whether you are even, odd, attending in person or remotely. People attending at FEUP premises are being recorded only for warning purposes in the event of a positive case of COVID being detected.
- The attendance is not a factor in the evaluation; performing well in the practical work and passing the exam is all that is required.
Questions regarding topic choices
“What is the objective of the work?”
Good evening!
We have some questions regarding the project, namely regarding its objective. Are we supposed to build a web application that interacts with the user? Is the purpose of consulting the website to acquire some data? We have already been doing some research related to our area. What we found were some examples of Bioinformatics sites, in which the objective is to acquire data related to a certain area. We also found some type of platforms for accessing patient data, in which they can, for example: make an appointment online, consult medical prescriptions, etc. But we don’t know which one will be the most suitable, or if it fulfils the project’s objectives. Would it also be possible to give us some more examples of projects?
Greetings, A B
Professor Reply
Dear A and B
The application to be developed will be a dynamic website (with editing, visualization, listings, login and logout functions, etc.) with a pleasant interface (responsibility of the CSS sheets) and which saves the data in a sqlite3 relational database.
It seems to me very interesting your idea of trying to implement something related to your technical knowledge in the fields of medicine, as you can capitalize on both areas. In fact, all students are invited to try to implement something that they “bring from home”, something that is close to them, instead of the normal “football club”, “recipe site”, “restaurant” etc. If you choose to implement one of the latter, I recommend that you give it a “twist”, or in other words, something special. For example, if it is a football club, it may have a feature that allows you to buy and sell players, manage partnerships and promotions in those partners, instead of just registering lists of players and numbers of goals scored (just one example). This is up to you … the interesting thing is to be original, and use EVERYTHING that I teach you in practical and theoretical classes.
One of the most important challenges in the project is, however, to organize and manage your time properly. In such a project it is very easy to get lost in the detailing of endless requirements and in the implementation of complex things. As in a professional environment, you need to decide where you are going to invest most of your effort. For example, if you decide to implement a medical appointment scheduling feature, you will have to implement scheduling logic, to prevent the same time slot from being allocated to two different appointments. If you ignore this functionality and focus on buying (from suppliers) and selling (to patients) medicines, they will have to manage suppliers, prices…
So, whatever the topic (management of a pharmacy, clinic, clinical analysis center, etc.), the greatest challenge is choosing what to implement—which features are you going to focus your effort.
Finally, and answering your question directly, it is possible to make a quality project with this idea of clinical management platforms.
I hope I have cleared your doubts!
JRS