Melbourne Institute of Technology: Assignment Template Instructions

This document serves as a detailed assignment template specifically designed for students at the Melbourne Institute of Technology (MIT). It provides comprehensive instructions for authors, covering essential aspects such as formatting, layout, and citation styles. The template specifies font types and sizes, margin requirements, and page numbering. It also includes guidelines on structuring headings, subheadings, and paragraphs. Furthermore, the template emphasizes the importance of proper in-text citations using the APA style and provides examples for citing various sources. Detailed instructions for the reference section are included, with examples for books, journal articles, and websites. The document underscores the significance of adhering to these guidelines for a well-presented and well-structured assignment. It also includes information on copyright and author responsibilities. Students are encouraged to use this template to improve the quality of their assignments.

Assignment template Melbourne Institute of Technology
Student last name & ID
Instructions for Authors (Title)
Jane Austin (Affiliation style), ID
Email: [e-mail]
Abstract
For all submissions, you will be asked to submit title, author, abstract, and keywords. The assignment title
should be in 14 points, Times New Roman bold. Author's name and ID should be in 10 points Times Roman
plain. Leave 12 points of space before and after the assignment title, 12 points of space after the author's name(s)
and 12 points of space after the author's email address. The abstract should summarise the significance, research
problems, contents and impact of the assignment in between 40 and 150 words. Note that assignment title,
author's name and author’s email should be centred. The abstract should be in 10 points Times New Roman italic
and should be justified (left and right flushed). Leave 24 points of space after the abstract. (Abstract style)
Keywords
Five keywords must be included, separated by commas.
Note: You should learn how to use this template carefully, because the designer observed that
80% of the students have not idea about how to use it!
1. INTRODUCTION - BODY OF THE submission (Heading – 1)
In introduction you should argue the significance, research problems, contents and impact of
the assignment in the abstract based on a number of literature review.
This document provides detailed instructions for students on the form, presentation and layout
of assignment s. Adherence to the instructions will help achieve a high quality of assignment.
Assignments that diverge from these instructions may not be devalued. (This is Paragraph
Style)
Assignments should not exceed 10 pages in length including the abstract, author details,
references, acknowledgments, appendices and copyright statement. Page size should be A4.
Allow for a 25 mm margin on both sides of each page, a 25 mm margin at the top of each page
and a 25 mm margin at the bottom of each page.
All text should be formatted according to the details of these instructions. Students should
keep copies of their assignments.
Submission of assignments for assessment should be made electronically via the Blackboard
assignment submission system. All submissions should be in Microsoft® Word.doc format, or
pdf format and must be formatted using the styles illustrated in this document.
For MS Office 2007, use the save as option ‘Word 97-2003 document’ so that it will be saved
as a ‘.doc’ file rather than ‘.docx’. Please ensure that your filename has the appropriate
extension - .doc and that there are no other periods (full-stops) in the filename. Please does
not password protect your document.
2. Enterprise Architecture
From now we can process the text in a unified way

Assignment template Melbourne Institute of Technology
Student last name & ID
3. DOCUMENT LAYOUT
Paragraphs should commence at the left margin and should not be indented. Leave 6 points of
space prior to each paragraph. All text should be in 12 points Times New Roman and justified
(left and right flushed). All text is to be single-spaced or double spaced. Headers, Footers and
Page Numbering (Heading – minor)
The page header should be 10 points Times New Roman. Make sure that you:
 enter a short title for your assignment in the document header (up to 50 characters
including spaces).
 include page numbers on your document in page footer of your document.
3.1 HEADING 2
Heading 1 should be in upper case, 12 points Times New Roman Bold, with 12 points of
space prior to the heading. All headings should be numbered.
3.1.1 Heading 3
Minor headings should be 12 points Times New Roman Bold with the initial letters
capitalised and 12 points space prior to the heading. (Note: for minor headings and very
minor headings words like ‘the’, ‘of’, ‘a’, ‘an’ are not capitalized unless it is the first word of
the heading.)
Within paragraphs, sub-points may be distinguished by bullets, dashes, bracketed letters or
bracketed roman numerals, as follows:
 First option (Bullet 1 style)
 Second option (Bullet 2 style)
(b) Third option (Bullet 3 style)
(iv) Fourth option (and Bullet 4 style)
4. FIGURES AND TABLES
Any exhibits (tables, figures, illustrations etc.) should be placed as close as possible to the
first reference made to it. Exhibits should be centred between the left and right margins, and
numbered and identified by a brief description. Captions should be 11 points Times New
Roman and numbered consecutively (e.g., “Table 1” or “Figure 1”). Table captions should be
placed above the table and figure captions should be placed below the figure. Please note that
the words “Figure” can be spelled out than “Fig.” wherever they occur. For example, see Fig.
1.
Figure 1: ACIS logo (Figure caption style)
Please avoid inserting diagrams in the native format of graphic applications such as MS Visio.
These can cause problems when converting the file to pdf. Diagrams should be inserted in a
common graphic format such as jpeg or gif.

Assignment template Melbourne Institute of Technology
Student last name & ID
4.1 Table Style
Inserting a table in the text can work well. See Table 1 below. The text of tables will format
better if you use the special Table Text style (in this template file). If you do not use this
style, then you may want to adjust the vertical spacing of the text in the tables. (In Word, use
Format | Paragraph, and then the Line and Page Breaks tab. Generally, text in each field of a
table looks better if it has equal spacing above and below it, as in Table 1.)
Table 1. A Sample Table (Table Caption Style)
Sample 1 Sample 2
Item 1 100 60
Item 2 120 325
Item 3 150 40
4.2 IN-TEXT CITATION
Citations must be in the APA style based on “manage sources” and “insert citation” of
Microsoft 2010. Citations in the text should include the authors’ last names and year of
publication. This involves references to Ajzen (1991) or to a publication (Ajzen, 1991).
When citing articles with two authors, both names should be cited in the text, for example,
Ajzen and Fishbein (1980). Use “et al.” when citing articles with three or more authors
(Applegate et al., 1996). When using multiple references, these should be ordered
alphabetically, and separated by a semi-colon (Agarwal and Karahanna 2000; Ajzen and
Fishbein 1980; Taylor and Todd 1995a; Vander Wal 2007). Multiple publications by the
same author within the same year are differentiated as Taylor and Todd (1995a; 1995b).
Where the author is unknown (Anonymous 2001), or is an organisation, an appropriate name,
organisation name or acronym should be used, for example (ACS, 2007; OECD, 2003).
When quoting text please use “smart quotes”.
5. AUTHOR'S RESPONSIBILITIES and COPYRIGHT
Students are to ensure the accuracy of their assignments. Students retain their copyright in the
assignment.
6. CONCLUSION
This submission guideline is intended to help guide you in the presentation of your work. By
adhering to the guideline, you will help the lecturers tremendously in reducing our workload
and ensuring that your assignment is well-presented and well-structured. We thank you very
much for your assistance and look forward to receiving your assignment.
7. Quality of your references and referencing
1. You should improve the quality of your references. Normally,
references (journal articles and proceedings papers) from
www.elsevier, www.acm.org, www.ieee.org, www.ais.org and
LNCS/LNAI from www.springer.de, to name a few can be considered
a high quality of references. The references used in your assignment
should be uniform with normal distributions, that is, if you used 10
references, then it is better for you to use 2 books, 3 journal articles,
3 conferences proceedings articles, 2 websites, etc.

Assignment template Melbourne Institute of Technology
Student last name & ID
2. You should improve the quality of your cross-referencing or
referencing at either sentence level or paragraph level, that is, you
should make your cross-referencing or referencing in your
assignment in a unified way. Some students only use cross-
referencing or referencing in one or two sections so that the
assignment was devalued.
8. Conclusion
In this section, you should summarise your research work and then propose your future work.
9. REFERENCES
The references should immediately follow the last section in the text. Do not start a new page.
References in the text must be included in Reference section and vice versa. Sufficient
descriptions should be given to enable the reader to locate all publications referred to in the
text. They should be arranged in alphabetical order by surname of first-named author (or the
title of the work for items with no author or editor listed) then date. For references to items in
periodicals, include the author, title, journal, volume, number, month, year, pages. For
authors, last names are given first, even for multiple authors. For references to reports or
proceedings, use the author's name and title of report, report number, source, editor and/or
publisher as appropriate, city and state/country of publisher OR full name of conference as
appropriate, including date and pages. For references to books, use the author's name, title,
publisher, city, state/country, year, page, or chapter. It is preferable that your references
comprise only of published materials accessible to the public. However, if it is necessary to
use unpublished works or private communications, these are to be mentioned within the text
and included in the reference list. References to electronic documents should include an
appropriate Universal Resource Locator (URL) and date of access. The use of ‘et al.’ in the
list of references is prohibited. The names of all authors and editors must be listed. If you are
using EndNote, please check your references to ensure that the settings are correct and that all
authors are listed in the references.
When formatting references, leave 6 points of space above each reference, and use a hanging
indent of 0.5. (On the horizontal ruler, drag the Hanging Indent marker to the position at
which you want the indent to start or use (Format>Paragraph>Indentation>Special>Hanging
to set the hanging indent.)
The following are examples of entries for books, articles, proceedings, and websites (all
references should be numbered as below):
[1]. Agarwal, R., and Karahanna, E. 2000. “Time Flies When You’re Having Fun: Cognitive Absorption and
Beliefs About Information Technology Usage,” MIS Quarterly (24:4), December, pp 665-694.
[2]. Ajzen, I. 1991. “The Theory of Planned Behaviour,” Organizational Behaviour and Human Decision
Processes (50:2), December, pp 179-211.
[3]. Ajzen, I., and Fishbein, M. 1980. Understanding Attitude and Predicting Social Behaviour. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
[4]. Applegate, L.M., Holsapple, C.W., Kalakota, R., Radermacher, F.J., and Whinston, A.B. 1996. “Electronic
Commerce: Building Blocks of New Business Opportunity,” Journal of Organizational Computing and
Electronic Commerce (6:1), January, pp 1-10.
[5]. Bhattacherjee, A. 2000. “Acceptance of E-Commerce Services: The Case of Electronic Brokerages,” IEEE
Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans (30:4), July, pp 411-420.

Assignment template Melbourne Institute of Technology
Student last name & ID
[6]. Taylor, S., and Todd, P. 1995a. “Assessing It Usage: The Role of Prior Experience,” MIS Quarterly (19:4),
December, pp 561-570.
[7]. Taylor, S., and Todd, P.A. 1995b. “Understanding Information Technology Usage - a Test of Competing
Models,” Information Systems Research (6:2), June, pp 144-176.
[8]. Vander Wal, T. 2007. “Folksonomy Coinage and Definition.” Retrieved 14 April, 2013 rom
http://vanderwal.net/folksonomy.html
This document is designed and updated by Dr Zhaohao Sun, SITE UB on 31 Jan 2013