DePaul University, Future Forward Webinar Transcript

Bob Ertischek JD ~ Yellowdig Academic Lead 0:00

Welcome to our wonderful guests webinar today, featuring Margit Mar I can't even speak anymore. Margie McGee Newton and Hilarie Longnecker from Future Forward at DePaul University. I'm Barbara, check. I'm Yellowdig's academic lead. And we're going to turn the program over to Hillary Margie in just a moment. But first, we thought it would be a good idea for those of you who may not know what Yellowdig is to just quickly talk about what Yellowdig is. And we can go back to the agenda, I guess. So what is Yellowdig? Anyone know, raise your hand.

Let's move on to the next slide. That was while he raised his hand, that's awesome. So Yellowdig, as you can see on the slide is a digital platform that leverages an understanding of human behavior and gameful technology to build healthy online learning communities. I like to think of Yellowdig as an organic student engagement engine. With familiar frictionless sharing that you would find in various other social platforms with built for higher education really creates vibrant learning communities, for your students, whether they're in the classroom or out of the classroom. And if you'd like to learn more,

that's you can reach out to learn more@yellowdig.com or simply go to Yellowdig.co To find out more, we happy to answer any questions you have. Shall we move on?

So our agenda today, we're going to have some introductions, and then we'll talk about future forward Oh, Hillarie and Margie Well, then, we're going to talk about the big pilot dashboard analysis and have a q&a session. And somewhere in there, actually, between number two and three, we'll have a little panel discussion about what's going on in the future forward program. So you know, I've already introduced myself, I'll just add one thing I'm so I'm yellowlegs academic lead. That means I work with our clients. To help them get the most out of the platform. I talk about pedagogy and best practices and Teaching Tips. And if you ever need any advice on Yellowdig, and how to use it and how to maximize your use, feel free to give me a shout at Bob@yellowdig.com. I will now introduce Hillary and Margie and let them let them take over. And here we go. Hillary, thank you.


Hilarie Longnecker ~ Associate Director of Curriculum and Early Engagement @DePaul 2:21

Um, hi, everyone. My name is Hillarie and I'm the Associate Director for curriculum and early engagement at the school's Career Center.

Margie McGee Newton ~ Director of Career Education @ DePaul 2:29
My name is Margie McGee Newton and I'm the Director of Career Education at the DePaul Career center and I oversee the advising team as well as our career curriculum arm. We're lucky at DePaul to be able to offer courses for our students through our Career Center. And this program we're going to be talking about is a little bit of an extension of that in a non curricular fashion.

Next slide.


Hilarie Longnecker ~ Associate Director of Curriculum and Early Engagement @DePaul 3:04

Alright, so let's talk a little bit about what future for it is why we created it sort of set the stage for how we integrate it Yellowdig into this program. So essentially, Yellowdig, or I'm sorry, future forward rather, is a co curricular program designed for our first year students. And it really is focused on getting them engaged with Career Early. As you can tell by my job title, that is something that's important to us in the Career Center at DePaul, we really focus on this idea that we want to get students thinking about career thinking about how it connects with their academics, and really their larger experience as a college student from their very first quarter as part of the DePaul community. So we create a future forward last spring and develop that through the summer to launch this past fall. So really, in our first year of the program, piloting learning a lot about about how to best deliver this content. But essentially, the program is a year long program that allows students to really jumpstart that journey towards towards their career.

What we try to do is really engage students in meaningful career exploration. So they're spending a lot of time in the program learning about both themselves as well as learning how to learn about the world of work, how to experience it, how to weigh out different options and plan for their future. And we do that through a few different things, including an intentional suite of online modules that allow them to work at their own pace, peer to peer community building, which is a big part of where Yellowdig comes in, and some interactive experiences. And ultimately, what we're trying to do is prepare them to become career ready by becoming early users have the career center so that they can spend their full four years at DePaul really thinking about and engaging with the services that we offer. Next slide please.

The student experience with future forward centers around these 12 Interactive modules. So the modules cover things like values, interests, strengths, as well as like I mentioned before, really learning about the world of work.

As we develop this program, you know, we really recognize that we were in a unique situation and that

we went forward a little bit, but I think they'll back I'll talk a little bit about more about the student experience. And as we develop this program for this year, that's very unique year of 2020, we recognize that the way that they would be engaging with us would be very different than a traditional year where they might be on campus. So while we were sort of dealing with that uniqueness of the year, we also really intentionally designed the program to be in a way kind of really designed for a remote experience, and that students don't need to be at any given place at any given time. It's very flexible, it's meant to work around their schedule as students. So these 12 Interactive modules are things that they can compete complete at their own pace. And they're also having a shared experience of those modules. When it comes to the career events and career experiences that we have for them, we want to think of those more as their electives, the things that will help to tailor the program to their own career interests. So for example, with career events, they might attend a workshop, or a career fair, they may attend a networking event, something that's going to give them a taste of what that's like, because one of our major objectives for the program is to help them feel very comfortable and confident in using these services. Because we find that that is oftentimes a hurdle for our first year students is just, you know, kind of having the confidence to partake, we also want to help them engage in a career experience. And this could be something like a virtual job shadow, an informational interview, it could also have to do with securing a job. So going through the application and interviewing process for an on campus role. Just a few examples. And again, that is designed to motivate them to partake in these experiences throughout their time at DePaul, versus, you know, just didn't have a traditional way to do these things later in their academic career. As future forward students, they're also going to receive a lot of great guidance from our team. So we have a dedicated team of staff, including Margie and myself. But even more importantly, are a set of trained student leaders. So these student leaders in our pilot year, we have one one fantastic student mentor, as we move towards next year, we're going to be recruiting students out of the current class to serve as mentors to the next class. And they are just kind of guides folks that have been there, you know, in the shoes of the students that can sort of speak to their experiences, but also prompt them to, you know, move through the program, but to also make really strict meaning of what they're doing in the program. And, of course, we do have a carrot associated with the program. And that is a tuition grant that students earn for successfully completing the program requirements.

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Next slide, please. And so I mentioned like, we were sort of setting the stage of this, you know, during a time when we were all working remotely, and many of our students have not had the opportunity to even you know, maybe visit campus. And certainly, most were not living on campus in the way that a traditional first year by a student might experience their first year. So we really want to make sure that we were offering a shared space for them not only to process, the content of the modules and the learning outcomes of the program, but also to really build community to develop friendships and develop relationships. Because not only do we see this as a career education program, it is also a in some ways a retention strategy for the university because we know that students are retained at higher rates, when they are engaged with putting making plans and progress towards their future goals. So too, that's really where Yellowdig came in. as we explore different ways to do this, we really appreciate it. The social media life feel of the platform, it felt like it would be very familiar to the students. But it also gave space to have both programmatic discussions, as well as some of those other types of discussions that you might have traditionally, in a dormitory or in the cafeteria. So an opportunity for them to lend support and just discuss what was going on in their life. We started out the program, we had split them into cohorts of about 25 students for our fall quarter. And we ended up collapsing those communities into groups of 50 students for our winter quarter and we'll continue that for spring quarter and we found that that bigger group of students has really led to some some richer conversations. Another sort of transition or lesson learned as we went through this pilot year is the value of Yellowdig's, topics, these tags that you can place on each post. And we so we found in our fall quarter that some students were maybe a little shyer to speak up, maybe weren't so confident or short of what to post about, we really found that the topics allowed us to inspire conversation without necessarily directing it. So our topics are, are varied, some of them are directly associated with one of the modules like module five, or six, or what have you, is, along with the topic of that module, but others are things like remote learning hacks, or things I'm doing outside of school, or even random thoughts, it's typically our most popular or most used topic tag on on the platform. And again, we found that using these type of tabs really inspired the conversation. At the same time, we do want to make sure that they are attending to the content of the program as well. So we use module, a call out throughout the modules and the companion workbook for the program. And that is the little icon that you see on your screen there. So anytime, you know we we have that icon, what we are trying to signal to them is Hey, don't forget about the future feed, go ahead and focus there. And I should say future feed is how we branded Yellowdig for our particular program. So that's what we call it for this, this program.

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Also, I'll say that we try to get students involved with the community aspect of the future feed or Yellowdig through some of the real time social events that we do, and that's been really successful as well. So students will attend a real time social event, maybe a trivia night or something along those lines, and then be encouraged or incentivized through bonus points to post about the program. And we've had some great content there, you know, where students have been able to tell us like, Hey, you know, I thought I would just do this for the bonus points. But I really enjoyed it, it was really actually cool to be able to go into a breakout room and talk to some of my peers. And it's been really neat also to see the responses of their of their cohort members who didn't go to the program saying, oh, man, I sorry, I missed that I wish I had attended. And we reran some of those events based on that and had great engagement, too. So those are some of the ways that we're using Yellowdig in the future forward program.

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Margie McGee Newton ~ Director of Career Education @ DePaul 12:38

I know that when Hillary and I were looking at how we were going to have this peer to peer organic community building slash conversation space, and we're looking at different products, I had a hard time understanding what Yellowdig delivered. Because I've taught online for 20 years, and I know what a discussion board does, right? I know very clearly. Think about this, talk about this. And then you know, Aaron's I agree with Sam data, data data. I agree with him that, right. So like, I am very familiar with the limitations of a traditional discussion board. And in particular, you know, I the lack of sophistication around that and lack of authentic communication that happens. So we wanted to share with you guys some screenshots, just to illustrate some of the things that I think really share what Yellowdig does, it's different from a traditional discussion board.

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Number one, it's very much, it's so much more authentic than hierarchical discussion board where you have the single prompt, usually by the instructor, and then the students reflecting on that, you know, over just reading what someone else wrote and kind of restating it, students, we have a prompt in the module saying, hey, this would be a good time to go to future feed, and share your experience with this assessment we gave you or something like that. But once they land there, what I love about as they're leaving, I like that they're leaving that space, which is a controlled space, that's my space, and then they're going to their space. This is the space where they decide what to talk about. And because the points are automatically given for posting, responding, commenting, etc. It incentivizes actual conversation that doesn't happen in a traditional discussion board. Why would you even converse in a discussion board, when I've really only getting the point for having posted something? So that's something that is really exciting what we've figured out especially now that we're using these topics, and like Hillary said random thoughts is like number one, which really illustrates, okay, this is authentic, because why would you even post this on here, unless this was communication that you're interested in sharing. The other thing to know about future forward

As a program is, is not credit bearing. So we have to, like we were very conscious in designing this, this has to be fun. I call it the sprinkle approach to learning. Like the modules are fun, they're silly, we have gifs in them, etc. Like they're just fun. And we needed this experience to be to be to feel like an experience that a student would enjoy. So this is an example of the incredible amount of community building that happens without us prompting it. We didn't tell them to go over here and post Hey, finals, guys, you should take a break, let's get motivated what our goals like this kind of cheerleading, we'll have another example. This is 100%, organic. And this student just took it upon themselves to post Good luck. Here's some quotes that inspire me, what are some quotes that inspire you. And so anyone who hearts that or who replies to it is part of that conversation and is getting those points that help them fulfill their requirement. So the the piece of the interesting thing I think about Yellowdig is the point system, because there's a real gamification psychologically in there for students of like, reward, right? It's like a Pavlovian response to I'm going to be in the space communicating, because there's this automatic kind of feedback I'm getting. And I'm also getting communication with peers that I don't get in other ways. So we have a couple examples that just illustrate some of the posts and some of the relationships that happened really organically. And I think that those are the two really important parts of what this product does, which is it's organic, and it's authentic, and that I haven't seen another place where that can happen.

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Outside of, you know, good old social media, where we don't have the kind of, you know, we don't have the insights there and the headspace to operate in there the way we can in here.

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Next slide.

So this is kind of a good example of sharing in terms of like, this is, again, very organic, we didn't prep, this is a random thought. So the student says his winter quarters coming to an end, I was wondering what key takeaways people have had, from this quarter of the future for a program, I learned the importance of creating professional connections. I can't as someone who's been teaching forever, like, this doesn't happen in the classroom, right? Like, at the end of class, you don't have the student come up to you, or come up to the group of students to say, guys, what did you learn, does not happen.

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But it does happen in the States, because it is weird, all social media space, but you know, you're there to kind of talk about what you're learning. And I, if you had told me that this, this feels scripted. Like, honestly, I would write that and hope that a student would come up with it. But this is the kind of conversations they're having with each other. And they are getting the points just for chatting. And I can't even say how impactful this has been for this population, because these are those, those kids that everybody was worried about, right? They weren't going to have their graduation, they weren't going to matriculate to college, or if they did matriculate, they would have such a different kind of shadow experience. I really feel like the students who were part of this program had a leg up on other students, because they had this opportunity to build community that is actually really different.

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Not a replacement for in person. But for me an enhancement, like we will be using this product when we're in person too. Because it is so flexible. And that's really one of the points of the whole program we designed

if you want to go to the next slide.

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The other thing is there's a lot of peer to peer reflection, one of our goals for future forward is to normalize the experience of uncertainty around career. Because if you if careers this thing that is so stressful, everybody has a figured out, we're really trying to mythbuster around that and to normalize and to build a community of people who have a shared experience.

This kind of reflection and us not driving it like when we first started using this product, I just imagined Hillary or myself going on there. Hey, guys, you know, okay, Boomer kind of stuff in there, where I'm trying to prompt conversation, and then people being like, okay, maybe, but what's really exciting about this as students are there is peer to peer and I cannot wait for next year when we have a team of experienced peers contributing to this as well because that'll add that other dimension. Hilary and I can't go in there like mom and dad. I mean we do sometimes, but we can't go in there and like do some Hey guys stuff where

These folks can have a prop. Oh, they didn't even notice he did start with Hey, guys.

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But just the student talks about how, you know, I've actually been thinking about on minor. What about you guys? What do you think you might want to do? Like this? Is it normalizing this conversation, and also creating a space for just topics? We do see some I have some other examples that I don't think we shared in here, where students refer to specific resources on campus. So they'll say, oh, have you talked to this person? Or have you talked to this office. And that's incredible to like that any first year program, the peer to peer actual resource piece of it would, it's a huge asset.

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Next slide. So and this is kind of reiterating, normalizing. I'm surprised at how earnest students are on this platform in terms of them knowing it's their space. And I think part of that is the automatic awarding of points, because it feels like the machine is doing that it's not Hillary and myself grading, right. So that piece of it, I think, makes it easier for students to be themselves. And to not be kind of writing this as if it's homework, right. And I think that that is built into the point system, just not being a reflection of the actual content as much as it is on the actual experience that the student is having, and in creating for other people.

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So I've seen a lot of people be really personal on here, in terms of like, this is really stressful. I know, it seems scary. I'm not sure what to do, I feel overwhelmed. And that is another benefit, I think of having this space. And for us.

Career Planning is very much a part of your academic journey. And it's also very much I think it's a very stressful experience for a lot of our students. I mean, in it to Paul, we have 40%, non traditional age, a third Pell eligible. So we're talking about, you know, populations of students. And what's great about this program is there for every college. So I have everyone ranging from a first year accounting student whose dad has already told him what internship he needs to get to an undecided liberal arts student who's really not sure where they want to go, and they are in the same space. And I love that that's the other piece. That's great. Having a college structure, I think sometimes makes it harder for students to kind of get out of their own bubbles. But the way that we created these groups kind of randomly, and the randomization involved in that, I think will benefit them moving forward. And they won't feel like oh, well, this is a college a business question, not a, you know, College of Liberal Arts.

Next. So this is another example of the cheerleading. So this person first posts about like, I haven't made my resume, and I'm really nervous about it, I am just the fact that they feel safe sharing that in this space tells you that they see it as their space, it's not our space, it's their space.

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But immediately, well, not immediately. But after someone posted this, someone popped in and say, You know what, it's intimidating at first. But once you break it down, you'll be able to do a great resume. And this is just we just these are we have like, probably like 40 screenshots that we've been collecting to use when we talk about this program with our stakeholders. So these are just a sampling. But I think that it really does, it's harder to describe exactly how different this is, from a traditional discussion board without this kind of example, this illustration of folks who are just and I think this one was, you can't see the topic, but this topic was like the module around resume building. And that's another interesting thing too, like, I might prompt them in that module to say, hey, maybe you want to think about this part of your resume and future feeds, but they don't have to, they take the topic of the module, and they decide what part they're most interested in talking about. The other weird side effect of this process is that we can see live action wise, how people are responding to our modules. So Hillary and I are module designers. And we're always trying to keep up with the next quarters module content. I just will run around on this platform and look for how students are talking about like, what are they worried about? What are they interested in? What was their experience of some of this content? So it's actually been a really good feedback tool for us in the program. And I think that when we talk about data, we will be able to talk about that as well.

What's the next slide? Oh, okay, so more. I thought that was our last one.

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This is just an illustration of like, advice. Like the advice that happens in this is on future feed is pretty robust. And like I said, I have to bite my tongue. I want to be in there all the time saying like, oh, what about this? Or what about this, but I bite my tongue. And I let these students share their experience. And I know it's more meaningful coming from up here versus coming for me, particularly because, you know, like, we don't look like our students. I mean, even when I was younger, I didn't look like all my students. And I think it's what the pure piece of it, I just can't say enough about it. As far as like, this is, it's organic, and they're doing, I really didn't imagine they would be doing this much authentic conversation as they ended up doing.

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Bob Ertischek JD ~ Yellowdig Academic Lead 25:35

Wonderful. So, you know, obviously, we're biased, we love Yellowdig. But it's so great to hear a story that reflects a lot of our thinking. But But, and I don't wanna spend a lot of time on this, because we have some other things to get to as well. But I wanted to ask of just a few questions that maybe you can address. As far as First of all, in this as a non credit bearing course, I'm curious how you introduce students to Yellowdig, and how you got them to start, you know, participating there.

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Hilarie Longnecker ~ Associate Director of Curriculum and Early Engagement @DePaul 26:12

Yeah, so we actually did a launch for the program in August before the students started. So we talked a little bit about what Yellowdig was then we also as that as part of that launch, we're really intentional about having them in their smaller cohorts, for portions of that so that they could start to build some of those relationships are to have some of that conversation. So that's sort of pre to the first quarter. And then, as part of getting into the first quarter, we had a module that went over some of the things we went over in launch, but also like set up again, Yellowdig, or the future feed as a place for them to to converse. So they encountered it in several different places. And as we mentioned before, throughout all of the the materials that they're that they're engaging with in the program, whether that's the modules, or that's the workbook, they are, you know, consistently being reminded of the existence of future theater as a place for them to add their voice, and, and discuss. And so even without the grade, the points for motivating the students yet, so they, when we do have a minimum number of points that they have to earn per quarter to stay current with the program. And in good standing with the program, we found that the good majority of them are keeping pace, some of them like to put it off a little bit later in the quarter as college students might. But because we're also pacing the modules and the content, so we released a new module every couple of weeks, you know, that is another just prompt for them to to go in and earn some of those points. But yeah, they do have to earn the points in order to stay in good standing and keep their tuition. Correct. So it's important for them to make sure that they did that.

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Bob Ertischek JD ~ Yellowdig Academic Lead 27:52

And a few other things, first of all, I mean, you sort of highlighted, you talked about authenticity, and students, you know, bringing in their own, you know, thoughts and things like that. I mean, to me that that speaks a student agency, that feeling that they had to to be able to use this community as their own, and also to provide relevance to their fellow students. Is that a fair assessment? No, that's sort of a leading question, but that's what I got. No, I

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Hilarie Longnecker ~ Associate Director of Curriculum and Early Engagement @DePaul 28:20

think I would get I definitely agree with that. I think it has been, you know, certainly a place for them to share, not just about the content of a career development program, but but truly about their experience as college students and moreso college students during a pandemic during a time when they're not necessarily on campus face to face in that traditional first year experience that I think we are so used to programming for. So this, again, is just a unique space for them to have that that that community space that they own, like I said, much like they would the conversations they might have on the quad or in other places on campus, if they were there.

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Margie McGee Newton ~ Director of Career Education @ DePaul 28:57

Yeah, I've seen some posts on Yellowdig even that say, I feel lucky to be in this program, because I have a leg up compared to other students like so they're aware that this is like part of an opportunity they have the other students don't in terms of meeting, both thinking about career but also just meeting other people.

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Bob Ertischek JD ~ Yellowdig Academic Lead 29:17

That actually takes me right to what my next question was going to be. And that is, did students through this meet people that they would not have met otherwise? and Yellowdig and, you know, do they seem to form relationships and that regard?

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Hilarie Longnecker ~ Associate Director of Curriculum and Early Engagement @DePaul 29:31

I mean, I would definitely say said Margie, earlier reference, how we created the groups by, you know, looking at a variety of different factors, whether, you know, it was major or college, it was socio economic status, race, all sorts of different ways that we could try to diversify the groups as much as possible to provide them with different perspectives. And when we first started to create the groups we thought about, you know, do we create a college specific group or we use career communities? So do we create Career community specific group where students are talking about similar interests. And we recognize it as a real opportunity to help students to really embrace exploration, to normalize that experience that just because you come in with one college, or you have one particular possible interest or an influence in your life, being exposed to this wider variety of students as wide a variety of career interests of academics of majors and such, I think really gives us students the permission or the freedom to, you know, embrace that idea of exploration in their first year.

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Bob Ertischek JD ~ Yellowdig Academic Lead 30:37

And, you know, I want to get to outcomes a teeny bit, but but before we do that, one thing, both of you, I think, said, especially Margie said about topics, and also sort of, you know, being able to, to use what's happening the other day, to inform your own roles, which I think is one thing that's great about your speaking as someone who used to be an instructor as well. You know, can you can you talk a little bit more about how you used what happened in Yellowdig, to to adjust or to to, you know, reach out to students or what have you?

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Hilarie Longnecker ~ Associate Director of Curriculum and Early Engagement @DePaul 31:12

Yeah, I think we saw that they enjoyed some of the content around assessments, little quizzes, and things like that, that they could take, because it gave them a shared experience. So we tried to integrate more of those in as we built additional modules. I also mentioned, you know, we found them lamenting about having missed an event. So we were able to rerun that event and good getting a pretty good attendance. So we're able to, you know, periodically take the temperature of what they're enjoying, or what, you know, is maybe less enjoyable and adjust accordingly.

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Margie McGee Newton ~ Director of Career Education @ DePaul 31:42

And I think on the data side, it'll be like some of the information we'll be able to collect at the end of this program is going to be very useful for moving forward for next year. So some of the like anecdotal feedback, as well as the qualitative data that we can pull will help us see, because next year, we're going to try and switch from 12 modules to 10. But how those more will have some ideas around, like which ones were really strong, which ones had a lot of conversation, which ones had fewer conversations about, so that we when we revise will have that the other pieces we're trying at DePaul to make this an all First Year Experience. And so we took like, I showed these screenshots to a lot of the leadership team at DePaul when I'm talking about future report. But what I think is really interesting is we're gonna have some numbers now, to actually back up some of the story that we're trying to tell. So like having, you know, in this one week period, 300 students did this, this is how many times they clicked here, you know, like, those numbers are going to really enhance the story we can tell to our internal stakeholders who we need to help us support the progress.

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Bob Ertischek JD ~ Yellowdig Academic Lead 32:58

Very cool, I would echo the bark at the end there, that would definitely be an important statement about the avec. So, you know, having gone through it, you know, were the outcomes what you expected? Or I mean, or maybe you didn't have those types of expectations? You know, being the first time that you're using it, I would have things turn out, I guess is I mean, it sounds all real good. But I mean, do you have any sort of ability to to assess the

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Hilarie Longnecker ~ Associate Director of Curriculum and Early Engagement @DePaul 33:27

we've, we've been very thrilled about the authenticity that Margaret Margie referenced earlier, it's just seeing that it's very, it's very organic. And then in the nature of the conversation, it's not that traditional discussion board where you post once and respond to to others. And I've taught many courses where I've done that, and you know, just the, the level of interaction and, you know, just strong desire to build relationships and to support each other is just very different with the Yellowdig platform. And I think that that's what we've been most impressed about. Margie and I write read the boards regularly. And we're always, you know, exchanging screenshots of just how, what we think of them as being super cute, but what we really mean about it is, they're just being there for each other, they're supporting each other. They're processing the information. They're adding their own voice, they're not just regurgitating, copying and pasting what they're seeing in the materials that we're providing them. It's through their own lens, and I think they're able to be each other's teachers in that sense.

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Margie McGee Newton ~ Director of Career Education @ DePaul 34:29

I was also really surprised at how open they were to being themselves on the platform like that just authentic but like, here's some music I'm listening to like, it just got me really excited that this is a space. I mean, the thing about DePaul is we have two campuses, a third of our students work full time. We have a good chunk of commuter students who pop in on the train, go home and work their job and come back. So what I'm really excited about is this, this online organic community is going to Even when we're in person is going to be really impactful. And in fact, I was just typing out an answer to a question in the chat about when we're are we in person in the fall? How will this work, we, this person will have to, has to stay asynchronous, because of the challenges that our students have. But this Yellowdig allows it to actually have this community part of it, we'll be doing some in person events. But there's no way I would let go of this like space. Because if you look like at the times, they're posting this stuff, I couldn't get them all in a room at that time. And that's not how like now that we're supposed to be post pandemic, there's no such thing as time anymore, right? Everything's recorded everything is, you know, out there in the ether. So I think that like, if that's a surprise to me, like, I think if we had been able to design this in an in person, we would have hamstrung ourselves in a really different way. And I don't know that we would have sought out a product that worked like this, but I'm glad we did, because I think it works really well. I think it's something we would continue using. I've said it before, too, if I was teaching, I it would be hard for me to teach a class now, knowing that this kind of tool exists and not having access to it. So the last thing I wanted to sort of mentioned before we move on is, you know, based on what you just said, you know, having this asynchronous platform that to me, and I'm curious as to your thought on this, when you have a space like Yellowdig students, and you don't have it in a face to face environment, right? The students are going to, in a face to face environment, interact with the people who are next to them, maybe even front and behind, and they'll never ever communicate with those people who are in the back of the room or on the other side of the room or what have you. And you know, do you feel like that interaction grew in Yellowdig? And in that way, you know, ya know, Bob,

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Hilarie Longnecker ~ Associate Director of Curriculum and Early Engagement @DePaul 37:00

I would absolutely agree with you. And because we're co curricular program, I would say like, we would even have the struggle of getting them in the room, you know, just because of the competing opportunities. But like what Margie said, you know that we have commuter students, we have students who are working, we have students who can't necessarily be in a physical place at a physical at a particular time to have those conversations. So this gives them that maximum flexibility to engage with not only their roommate, or their classmate, or the person sitting next to them in the cafeteria, but a whole host of other first year students.

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Bob Ertischek JD ~ Yellowdig Academic Lead 37:34

Well, thank you so much. I mean, this has been wonderful. And we'll look forward to continuing to hear your story as as you move in a, you know, forward in others future forward in other semesters. I'm gonna introduce Bri now who, who wants to make a quick statement, I suppose.

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Brianna Bannach ~ Growth Marketing Associate @ Yellowdig 37:53

Thank you all. And we just wanted to chat a little bit about the pilot program that we offer, because DePaul actually started out although there's looked a little different as a pilot. And so the pilot that we're offering is for faculty to use for one term. And they can use it for free to be able to learn if it's something that works for them and understand how to use it and also as a way to get analytics and and learnings to share with their higher ups so that they can get the funding that they need to use Yellowdig full time. And with that, if you have any questions, feel free to email, Learnmore@Yellowdig.com or we will be sharing a webinar that's coming up next month, you can stop by to learn more about that. But one of the features of the pilot is that you get access to a special pilot dashboard that enables some more analytics beyond what we already have built into the platform, which is still fairly substantial. And so we did a little bit of analysis with the Paul's use case so that we can show off how they were doing and what they use that for. So I'd like to introduce john who is our onboarding specialist to do a little intro about that and chat with Hilary and Margie about it.

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Jon Miron ~ Onobarding Specialist @ Yellowdig 39:08

Okay, thank you, Bri. Hi, everyone. I'm john onboarding specialist here. And yeah, it was it was great to go over some of the data on the outcomes of the future feed community. And just oh, you know, Bree gave a good overview of, of, of what we do in terms of providing data for our pilots, but you know, accurate Yellowdig we're, we're an efficacy and data driven organization. So we're really committed to providing our clients with the tools that they need to make informed decisions about their education technology. And, in, in the in these reports, we we really focus on on educational questions like our Comes focus questions such as are students conversing? Are they connecting with each other? Are they listening? Are they engaging? And then we provide the data to to answer those questions. You know, for example, one one use case that came up when I was I was talking with Hillary was that we were interested in a certain instructor intervention that happened at some point in the in the course, on a certain date, and what the sort of engagement community engagement outcomes were before and after that event. So we were able to run a report specifically on that. And and so that's, that's kind of one of the one of the one of the things that we have at our disposal with these reports, image here, you can see some of the visualizations that accompany the data reports. So on the on the left hand side there, there's a network graph that just has, you know, each of those little circles is that one of the students in the community and communicates, you know, how, how the students are connecting with one another, and this community, you can see, there's actually groups, so they're, they're forming little clusters. But, um, in addition to that, we have some other data visualizations there. But really, you know, it's all about, you know, asking questions, and then, and then finding the data that will help, you know, inform what you're looking what you're looking to either prove in terms of efficacy, or maybe something to inform how you adjust your teaching in the future. So So, yeah, that's, that's kind of, it's really exciting stuff. So I look forward to working with anyone who, who ends up doing a pilot with us to kind of go over this.

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Transcribed by https://otter.ai