What is peer review?

In the next steps, we are going to ask you to submit your analysis of the Corchorus olitorius genome assembly as an assignment. This will allow you to receive feedback on your analysis, so that you can check you have understood the process. You will also have a chance to comment on an assignment submitted by another learner.

This process is called Peer review. Because this is a massive open course, we educators won’t be able to give feedback on all of your reports individually. Feedback and reflection are an important part of applying what you have learned, so we are using the peer review system to help you.

Research shows that peer review is “related to the enhancement of student learning by means of reflection, analysis and diplomatic criticism.” Falchikov, 2006

In order to participate in the assignment, you will need to follow the instructions given and write down the steps you took to clean the assembly, and your conclusions about what you can see from the data. Please remember to include URLs showing how the blob plot looks after applying your chosen filters. Look back at the example report in step 3.9 to show how it should be formatted. Remember you don’t have to write a lot of text, just give the URLs and your identification of the organisms. Optionally, you can write a brief summary of what decisions you made at each step.

Please don’t forget to take into account the assignment guidelines that we will give in the next steps, they will also be used by your reviewer(s) to review your assignment.