Assessment 3 – INDIVIDUAL Blog and Learning Reflections (40%)
This is an INDIVIDUAL assessment that consists of three components:
- Blog detailing your weekly activities and learning (multi-media)
- Reflective report, which details your learning journey and explicitly cross-references the blog (written)
- Self- and Peer-Assessment of groups from assessment 2 (online questionnaire)
Weekly blog:
Blogs are a useful tool for yourself to keep track of activities you have carried out, as well as to nurture your writing and reflection skills. When published, blogs can also become powerful communication tools that enable you to share your experiences and learning with your stakeholders and the wider community. This assessment enables you to practice your practical blogging skills.
For this assessment, you are required to regularly record your weekly activities in the form of a blog. Blog entries need to be time stamped and demonstrate regular engagement with the Moodle blogging tool THROUGHOUT the term. Students who do not engage with the regular blogging activity and attempt to retrospectively write up their thoughts in one go at the end of term will lose out on important marks.
You should make sure your blog entries are re?ective in nature, rather than merely describing the activities you have carried out – a template will be provided in Moodle to help you with this and on-campus students will be encouraged to use some of the class time to record their re?ections. The fact that you are recording your activities and learning on a weekly basis helps you develop your group report (assessment 2), as well as the re?ective report (assessment 3).
You are strongly encouraged to add photographs, images, videos or other supporting material that may help you re?ect. There is no prescribed maximum of entries or words per entry as experience showed that many students ?nd this a useful learning exercise that they want to utilise to its full potential. However, the absolute minimum is 8 time-stamped entries spread across the term. It is best to write at least one entry per week and each entry should be no shorter than 150 words.
The blog component of assessment 3 is part of the assessment requirements and markers will check it for completeness, suitability as a communication tool, and reference material for your re?ective report. However, please note that you will not receive detailed written feedback about the blog content.
Reflective report:
While the blog is built throughout the term, the re?ective report is to be developed towards the end of the term, as it requires you to present a critical self-analysis and re?ection of your learningas a result of experiencing Design Thinking activity within this unit. The self-analysis and re?ection must consider your personal development, as well as the development of your knowledge of Design Thinking topics. As a conclusion, students are to develop an action plan of key events and activities that they can undertake over the next 6 months to acquire any knowledge, skills and behaviours identi?ed as requiring development.
The re?ective report should be submitted as a Word document with a length of 2,500 words (+/- 10%), excluding preliminaries, tables, ?gures and references. Your re?ective report must make reference to appropriate academic literature and theory in a critical way. Moreover, the report MUST explicitly reference appropriate evidence in your blog using a clear cross-reference system. The re?ective report must make use of at least 10 high-quality references (APA style).
Self- and Peer-Assessment (SPA):
You are required to ?ll in an online questionnaire, evaluating yourself and the peers you worked with for assessment 2 according to various team working criteria. This SPA questionnaire will be open for two weeks at the end of term and you will receive email communication about it. You are required to provide candid and fair evaluations of yourself and your group mates and – in controversial cases – you may be required to provide additional evidence to back up your evaluations. Please note that there is NO extension to the cut-o? point for this SPA questionnaire and late completion is NOT possible – students who fail to ?ll in the SPA by the given deadline will receive a mark of 0 (zero) for this component of assessment 3.
