Abstract
Postgraduate students typically conduct research as part of the
requirements for receiving a degree from higher education
institutions, and they do report their findings in form of dissertations
or theses. In all disciplines, students often struggle with the
research proposal phases because of issues like poor organisation, a
weak introduction, unclear research objectives, lack of background information,
a limited description of the methodology, lacking schedule
and resource allocation, and poor referencing and citation.
Problem statement
Proposal writing can be a difficult task for novices (especially inexperienced
students), and getting feedback from potential supervisor
is not guaranteed. For this task, there are no known tools that can
give a specific feedback about proposals to students (including those
in Information Technology Management field) regarding the structuring
of their proposal. In this respects, designing an artefacts in form
of an algorithm that generate examples of proposals sketches is capable
of aiding many students to write good and quality proposals in
information systems.
Methodology
This work employed the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology.
Using DSR was found suitable to concentrate on the development
and assessment of innovative artefacts that address practical issues
in information systems as well as in other fields. Through the creation
and assessment of artefacts, DSR’s main objective in this work
was set to produce new knowledge. This project proposed the synthesis
of master’s and doctoral information systems’ proposal sketches.
This means that users can generate, develop, and share ideas using
the technique of sketching. Furthermore, comprehending and getting
insight into a design problem can be accomplished through the use
of sketches. The sketching process is extended to the creation of research
proposal documents, and in order to do this work context-free
grammar rules were designed, and implemented as the artefact.
Findings
The finding showed that 31.9% of the respondents strongly agreed,
while another 37.5% agreed that they struggled to compose a proposal
in information systems domain, and 25% of the respondents
were neutral. This shows that master’s and doctoral students have
no insight on the information required in writing a proposal in information
systems. The designed artefacts (context-free grammars and
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algorithms) were used to synthesise 10,000 proposal sketches that can
be found on www.tinyurl.com/thesissketches.
Conclusion
The presented artefacts are expected to assist novices postgraduate
students in the process of composing their proposals in terms of writing
effective and understandable structural guidelines, variability and
iterations sections of the generated sketches, and the speed for generating
the sketches are precise, and not resulting in a deadlock.