This is an INDIVIDUAL assessment that consists of three components:

1. Blog detailing your weekly activities and learning (multi-media)
2. Reflective report, which details your learning journey and explicitly cross-references the blog (written)
3. 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 with real blogging software.

For this assessment, you are required to regularly record your weekly activities in the form of a blog and to submit the blog (or the web link to the relevant blogging website) as part of assessment 3. Blog entries need to be time stamped and demonstrate regular engagement with the blogging software 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 reflective 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 reflections. 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 reflective report (assessment 3).

You are strongly encouraged to add photographs, images, videos or other supporting material that may help you reflect. There is a blogging facility in Moodle, which you can use, or you may utilise any professional external blogging service, such as WordPress or Blogger. It is expected that entries are written at least once a week and each entry should be no shorter than 100 words. There is no prescribed maximum of entries or words per entry as experience showed that many students find this a useful learning exercise that they want to utilise to its full potential.

The blog component of assessment 3 is a pass-fail activity and markers will check it for completeness, suitability as a communication tool, and reference material for your reflective 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 reflective report is to be developed towards the end of the term, as it requires you to present a critical self-analysis and reflection of your learning as a result of experiencing Design Thinking and entrepreneurial activity within this unit. The self-analysis and reflection must consider your personal development, as well as the development of your knowledge of Design Thinking and entrepreneurship 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 identified as requiring development.

The reflective report should be submitted as a Word document with a length of 2,500 words (+/- 10%), excluding preliminaries, tables, figures and references. Your reflective report must make reference to appropriate academic literature and theory in a critical way. Moreover, the report it MUST make explicit reference to appropriate evidence in your blog using a clear cross-reference system. The reflective report must make use of at least 10 high-quality references (APA style).

Self- and Peer-Assessment (SPA):

You are required to fill 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-off point for this SPA questionnaire and late completion is NOT possible – students who fail to fill in the SPA by the given deadline will receive a mark of 0 (zero) for this component of assessment 3.

Week 1

Like most first weeks, there was not much breakthrough, rather a lot of settling. I learned about the concepts of innovation entrepreneurship, design thinking, and diffusion in general. Entrepreneurship is a process in which individuals pursue opportunities without regard to the resources they control. I am looking forward to the DT (design thinking) activities in this class, as I believe it will provide some hands-on experience. The instructor laid the foundation of innovation and business and have discussed concepts like diffusion. The instructor tried to not overwhelm us in the initial week, and in this settling period, I learned that communication is the key to entrepreneurial success and innovation.

Week 2

In this work, I have learned that the design process is an essential component in businesses and companies. I was made aware of the approach for dealing with simple to complex problems in business. It complemented the analytical perspectives needed in a leader. I especially liked how simplistic yet reflective was the Stanford D School model, which allowed emotions to be considered in the design thinking process. I also learned that we need to value observation and reflect on it for the critical decision-making process. Poster designing in this week, and we were taught how to be visual in the sharing of the message and leave an impact on the people.

Week 3

In this week, the relevance of associating the practical to the theoretical was emphasized. I have always fancied myself as a structured being, and in terms of the creative process inclusion, I was most able to relate to the action research plan shared by Swan (2002) for the inclusion of theory to the creative process. Initially, I was unable to see the point of writing a blog, however, post this week, I realized the relevance of the process in light of gaining reflective and analytic perspectives. In terms of theories, I found that I was more able to relate to the Action Research and Logic of Reasoning models of critical thinking in view of their systemic nature. This class made me look at the entrepreneurial process and world at large in a different light. I share an image I saw soon after this class here, and it made me think- how intricate yet perceptive and critical is the thought process of an entrepreneur. It is so liberating to acknowledge that I will be moving forward in a profession where I innovate and get to make a change.

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