Creating Your Assignment
The course has 3 Short Assignments, together worth up to 18% of your
grade, and 5 Assignments, together worth up to 50% of your grade. For
each of these, your assignment will be evaluated by three of your course
peers, and you will evaluate the assignments of three of your peers. Both,
the evaluation of your submitted assignment by your peers and the
feedback that you provide to your peers on their assignments, count
significantly towards your grade. Please note that you will not be able to
provide feedback to your peers unless you have submitted your own
assignment first, and that you will only receive the credit for your
feedback to peers upon providing real feedback for all three of your peers
(no partial credit for feedback). Please refer to the Handout on Grading
Details for a detailed breakdown of percentages towards your final grade.
Overview
The purpose of the 3.086x peer review system goes much beyond your
typical "peer grading" in MOOCs, because the proper innovation process
requires that you test every idea or insight in the most rigorous way
possible at every step along the way. You can only be confident of the
value of your ideas/insights after your best attempts of invalidating them
in the face of reality have failed. The 3.086x peer review system is a
great way to incorporate this innovation principle into your learning
experience.
To make your peer evaluations most constructive and efficient, your 3.086x course team has programmed a dedicated Assignment File Generator for each of your assignments. You use the Assignment File
Generator to create your assignment as a downloadable image file, which
you then submit to the peer evaluation process in a separate step.
Beyond conversion to an image file, the Assignment File Generator
• draws innovation schematics according to your input,
• allows for convenient text input of your answers and descriptions,
• formats your assignment to a common length and standard.
As a result of the common formatting and the auto-generated drawings, your and everybody else's assignments will be very easy to read and
review. It facilitates constructive feedback because you can compare your
assignments to those of your peers side by side. For each assignment, we
will give you specific questions in convenient format that we would like
you to address in your constructive feedback to your peers.
Create Your Assignment
This section will take you step-by-step through the creation of your
assignment using the Assignment File Generator. Although it is mostly
intuitive, there are some important aspects that are a bit special and that
you need to understand once. So please read this section carefully, and
then it will be straightforward from there on.
The Assignment File Generator has the following three parts, which are also illustrated in the first image below:
1. Assignment Instructions: The specific instructions for each
assignment precede the actual File Generator and provide you with the
information you need to compose your assignment. It references the
individual tasks to the respective input sections, which are clearly
labeled and numbered.
2. Assignment Composition: The number of sections in the input area
of the File Generator will vary from assignment to assignment. For
Short Assignments, there will be two input sections, as illustrated in
the image below. For Assignments, there will be more. However, there
are only two general types of input sections, plus some important
understanding for saving your work:
2a. Input for Innovation Process Diagrams: These are the
numbered input boxes which accept the names of your
Technology, Market or Implementation Components, as illustrated
in the first image below. Starting with Assignment 2, the input
boxes for the component names may be accompanied by numerical
input boxes, which you use to attribute the uncertainty to each
specific component. When there is no uncertainty input, the circle
around an individual component is scaled to its longest word. When
uncertainty is attributed, the circle size will be scaled according to
uncertainty.
2b. Input for Formatted Paragraphs: When you are asked to
reference the Technology, Market or Implementation Components
in a systematic way, like for grouping them by Research Method in
the Short Assignments, then you will input them according to their
input box number (which saves you from having to retype them).
This is always made clear by the instructions and the default text
that appears in the input boxes. The input boxes for paragraphs
are always limited to a maximum number of characters, as
indicated by the default text. Once you reach this limit, you just
cannot add any more characters. The character limit per input box,
which is necessary for common formatting, is always a prudent
choice with respect to the question/instruction at hand. Remember,
you can always express things more concisely, and the process of
doing so greatly helps clarification. To make input for the
formatted paragraphs compact and convenient, we adopted the
same scrollable input box technique as for all the Exercises that
use document analysis. You scroll through the
questions/instructions by using the Previous and Next buttons in
exactly the same way as explained in the second half of the
Technology Exercise 3 Video. The Update button has the
analogous function to that in the Exercises, except that the
updated information is not displayed. It is rather updated in the
program running in the background and then used for rendering
the image once you Preview the image or Generate the File (step 3 below).
2c. Save Inputs: If you want to navigate away from
the Assignment File Generator, you can save the information you
have entered in the input section by clicking the Save button
below the image preview area. However, you need to make sure
that you have clicked Update first, because only updated
information is saved. Only the information in the input section will
be saved, not the preview image. But you can just simply
regenerate the image from the input information (step 3 below).
Since it is very important, we'll put it in bold:
Always click "Update" before you preview or generate the image.
Always click "Update" and then "Save" before you leave the page.
3. Assignment Preview and Image Generation: First of all, you
can go back and forth between changing your input and previewing
the image of your assignment as many times as you like. Clicking
the Preview button generates a new image in the preview area
according to your latest inputs, but only if you have clicked "Update" first. The Clear button simply clears the preview image,
and it is good practice to use it between previews. When no
uncertainty is specified, we use a random function to create a slight
offset between the circles in the innovation drawings. You can
observe this, for example, by repeatedly clicking the Preview button with unchanged inputs for the Short Assignments.
o Formatting: The purpose of formatting is very much the
same as used throughout the scientific community for peer-
reviewed publications. All serious scientific journals have a
common format, and the best ones are significantly restricted
in length. By adhering to these formatting standards,
scientists can extract the relevant information much more
quickly and efficiently, because they know in advance where
each relevant piece of information will be found. By rendering
your assignments in a unified format, we achieve an even
higher efficiency than scientific community, since all of you
are authors and readers of the common format at the same
time.
o Over Limit Warnings: While the Short Assignments are
only one page each, each Assignment spans at least four
formatted pages, including various drawings. We adjust the
drawing size and paragraph layout dynamically, and as a
result, we optimize your use of space. Due to this dynamic
optimization, there might arise an "over the limit" warning of
two kinds, as illustrated by the second image below: (a) "a
more than 4 words" warning if your description of a
Technology, Market or Implementation Component is too
long, or (b) exceeding the page length. In either case, a
bright red warning will appear at the relevant position/page,
so please inspect all your pages before submission for these
warnings. All these "over the limit" situations can be
overcome quite easily by being a bit more precise.
o Generating the Image File: When you are happy with your
input, when you have checked your preview image file, and
when you have made sure there are no "over the limit"
warnings on any page, then it is time to generate the image
file for your assignment submission. When you click the
Generate File button, you will be prompted with a download
dialogue window. Please save the file as indicated, and
modify as per the instructions below:
Make sure you are online when generating the image file for your assignment. File generation will not work offline: it will only generate a duplicate under the preview image.
The image file of your assignment will be downloaded under a random or generic name to your download folder.
Rename your downloaded image file as a ".png" file.
Rename your downloaded image file with a useful name comprising the assignment name and some unique identifier.
o Printing: The edX platform does not currently support TIFF or pdf
formats for peer review modules. We have divided the assignment image
files into a "page preview" format for easy viewing and comparing.
However, if you want to print these files, we suggest you contribute to a
dedicated technical Wiki on Printing Assignment Images.
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