­Formative Essay Briefing
Essay title: Essay on Independent Learning
The deadline is Thursday 16 October 2014 at 1:00pm.
Assignment rationale: By conducting this formative assignment each student will learn how to research and reference appropriate academic literature sources. The students will also learn how to avoid plagiarism. By successfully completing this formative essay and reflecting on the feedback each student will receive a Plagiarism Awareness Certificate from his or her seminar leader. This certificate will form a part of the Portfolio (Assignment 3). Failure to complete and analyse the feedback on this formative essay will result in a potential failure of Assignment 3.
Learning outcomes (LO) assessed:
By completing this assignment the student should be able to:
1. Learn how to prevent plagiarism and use the Harvard Referencing System.
2. Conduct research using secondary data sources and, from these, select relevant data; use appropriate software and present information and solve business problems (module LO 3).
3. Communicate effectively in an appropriate format in a clear and concise manner using a range of communication tools, software and documents (module LO 4).
Submission: The formative essay should be saved as an MS Word or PDF document (other types of documents might not be accepted by Turnitin). All students are required to submit an electronic version of this document through Turnitin (a special software programme) by using a separate link on Blackboard.
If you have a financial hold situation please do not email your module leader or your seminar leader your coursework unless advised otherwise. The registry does not accept such email submission in most cases. The submission link will remain open after the deadline for those students who had serious circumstances that did not allow them to submit the essay on time.
If you are having technical difficulties on the date of submission please call FixIt (IT Help Centre).
We strongly advise that you submit your paper at least 3 hours before the deadline. This way if there are any technical issues you will have time to sort them out.
Penalties for late submissions: Since this is a formative assignment the formal rules on penalties for late submission will not apply. However any paper submitted more than 24 hours late will result in the delay of the feedback and a delay of the issuing of the Plagiarism Awareness certificate. Not having this certificate will result in penalties being applied to assignment 3.
Avoiding plagiarism: Your assignment must demonstrate your own individual work and ideas. Even if most of the ideas and phrases in your essay are paraphrased from the literature sources you will need to reference them correctly. Paraphrasing the literature sources shows your own understanding of the topic. All written work must be the work of the individual student.
Any quotations and references that you include in your essay will be identified by the Turnitin programme as being similar to other sources, i.e. Turnitin will generate a similarity content essay. Therefore it is vital that you reference correctly. We will be looking at the match count generated by Turnitin and evidence of plagiarism will be reported.
A Turnitin similarity content of 0% will be investigated by the Plagiarism Committee as it is regarded as being an indicator of an attempt to circumvent the plagiarism software. Since your essay must have references the Turnitin programme should identify them.
The word count: 800 +/- 10%. The word count excludes the Title page, Reference list at the end of the essay and any Appendices.
Assignment format: Double-spacing between the lines, Font Arial 12, Margins: right 2cm, left 3.5cm, top 2cm, bottom 2cm.

Task: The content of this essay is required to focus on the following:
Define independent learning, i.e. use at least one definition from an academic source (academic journal article or textbook);
Research and read relevant academic