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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