Level Up [Learner Engagement Summit]

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 0:04
Thank you all for joining us. What we're trying to do today is we're going to go through as much as we can have the following Agenda. But basically, the idea is that we're going to get you ready. reiterate you some remind you about some things in Yellowdig, and help you get set up so you can start your semester. On the right track, Brian and I will briefly introduce ourselves and our team will give you those reminders. We'll talk a little bit about our philosophy to remind you what Yellowdig is all about. And we'll give you some steps for getting started. With that. I think we'll just move right on. So this is the Yellowdig success team. I'm Bob Burns, Jack, I am the head of client success, Ben with Yellowdig. Well, let's see today, tomorrow will be two years in 11 months. Exactly. And basically, I My role is to help our professors, I used to be a professor and I also spent some time as instructional technologists, my role was to help with letting you get the most out of using Yellowdig as instructors understanding our best practices and pedagogy. And going through that, joined today by our Vice President of Academic product engagement. Dr. Brian Verdine.

Brian Verdine 1:20
Hi everyone, I'm Brian Verdine I'm our VP of academic product engagement, and my background was on psychology and education. Once I got my PhD from Vanderbilt, and did a postdoc at the University of Delaware. I started with Yellowdig, about four and a half years ago to do research on the platform and try to help our instructors get the most out of it. So this is a big part of that and making sure everybody gets started on the right foot.

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 1:48
And I do want to introduce the rest of our team because you will you may have the privilege of working with them in the future. Janine Galligan one of our success manager, she's actually in the this session, and she's introduced herself in the chat. As long with Deborah Olderding and other success manager, I both have extensive teaching experience and extensive Yellowdig experience. So you're in good hands with whoever you get. Moving on from that. Let's see if we can get started. So Brian, when people are getting started, what's what should they remember? What do they need to remember when they're getting started?

Brian Verdine 2:26
One of the things that we just like to make sure everyone knows is that Yellowdig was really created to be a single community as a single semester long assignment. So if you're designing a new course with the LOD, or you're you're just starting with us, you should make one assignment link inside of your course, assuming you're using a learning management system to access EOD. And just be aware that grades because of the way that that single assignment works, grades can go up or down in younger days, sort of until the last day when the greatest finalized and of course, you can adjust as you see fit all throughout. But until Yellowdig is finished at the factory, it is really not completely fine.

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 3:16
Bottom line is Yellowdig is not a series of weekly assignments, it is a single assignment that ultimately becomes due at the end of the semester, but the students need to participate if you're using our standard four point set up throughout the semester. All right. And, you know, as the semester starts and students and maybe you have issues with your own computers or logging in, or what have you want to make sure that you don't feel obligated to be the intermediary between your you and your students for technical issues or other issues that they're having. So please, for yourself, and for your students, if you encounter issues, or if your students encounter issues, please have them reach out to support@yellowdig.com rather than, you know, reaching out to you and then you telling us what the student problem is. And then we having to tell you that we don't know what that is until we talk to the student. So our support team is standing by and they're well suited to solve these issues. And hopefully, give you a little less stress as well just had a you know, hopefully won't come up with any issues. But supporting other digg.com is where they should go. There's also a little help question mark in the Yellowdig. Platform on the bottom left, that will show a little bit later that allows you to get to support as well. Brian, so most instructors use Yellowdig with a learning management system. So what issues go along with that that they need to be cognizant of?

Brian Verdine 4:45
Yeah, I think the most important thing is that, you know, if you're especially if you're using a Passpack that can't be set up. We can't establish that without the student accessing Yellowdig from the learning management so stone. And sometimes instructors will try to invite students in using email, or invite links, we don't usually recommend that if you are planning to use the learning management system, especially the grading. The reason is, basically, if you're invited students in that way, they'll start being able to use the community, but they won't be able to get their grade settle. The other thing that can happen if you use the invite links, especially for students is they might choose to use their personal email address rather than their institutional email address. And that can lead to duplicate accounts, if and when they ever are able to launch in through the learning management system. So typically, we don't recommend using those invite functions for students. And a lot of those were configured for sort of other community types are maybe having a guest speaker, like an alumni that you want to invite into your community as a guest wouldn't be in the one.

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 6:03
Of course, if you are not able to be integrated with a learning management system, then using the email invite is probably your best bet after that, that way you control the email addresses that students are using. Right. And if you have any questions, I will there's a q&a at the at that little zoom bar at the bottom of your screen, please feel free to put them in there. So we just wanted to quickly talk about the general idea behind Yellowdig. And what we're trying to accomplish. And we think it's best sort of described through the context of the Community of Inquiry framework, which purports to share what students need to succeed. And according to that framework, there are three important elements that create that complete educational experience. And those are the teaching presents, that's you in front of your students providing structure information, facilitating that one to many conversation, and that many to one conversation, the cognitive presents students reflecting on the material that they're learning, whether that's through an assignment, or reading a textbook, or what have you. And then there's the idea of this social presence, the idea that, you know, students have something to bring to the learning experience that's valuable to themselves and to their peers, that they have experiences related to the course concepts, that they see what's happening in the world related to those concepts, that they share different perspectives. And, frankly, that they have questions. And the reality is in synchronous, or in face to face classes. And that that presents while we assume it's there may not always be there. The other two are, and they're also very important. But that's synchronous in synchronous classes, that presence may not be there because you have a very short period of time. And in that period of time, it's really you as a teaching presence, that is deciding what those conversations are and who can speak and what they can ask and when they can ask it. And there's not even enough time for everybody to fully emerge in that. And, you know, in a typical social assignment, the post once common twice model, Brian, can you tell us a little bit about, you know, some of the issues that go along with that?

Brian Verdine 8:14
Yeah, as we started to really build the LOD and think about, you know, how to get students as engaged as possible in having natural conversations. There's a few things that we noticed about the sort of standard paradigms for doing that. And, you know, discussion boards are probably the prototypical one, but that's true of a lot of social assignments, essentially, the instructor, you know, sets the topic of conversation, asked a question that sort of all of the students need to respond to, and then, you know, they're often sort of told to discuss amongst themselves, or if it's a peer review, kind of assignment, you know, okay, do the peer review. But inevitably, there's a deadline, which students will often procrastinate to, and the more and more students that do that the less interaction they're actually doing. And, and so what ends up actually happening is, you know, the students that are there early in trying to participate, really don't have anybody to talk to, and they sort of learn over time that they might as well just come in at the end of the week, but the more students do that the less and less of a social assignment. This really is, students are answering, you know, their instructor, and then they're kind of firing off responses to other students, but nobody's really interacting, and maybe most importantly, those students that come in close to the deadline, I really don't have an opportunity to have a social interaction at all. Because the next week starts we start with a new assignment and nobody he's ever gone back and actually talking with that student completing those conversations. And so a lot of what we've been doing as a technology is trying to sort of break down the issues with that paradigm and, and try to create a very different experience for the students that will keep them more continuously engaged.

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 10:21
You know, and also, since students generally view this as an assignment, you know, they're not really interested in the conversation, they're interested in getting the grade from the instructor. And so they often do what I call post and run, they do their posts, they look at the immediate two posts before them. And right, I agree, I agree. And get out of there without really reading or bothering to find out anything else that's going on. And Yellowdig is a very different paradigm. You know, in Yellowdig, you as the instructor have a role we consider you to be you know, they're mostly to be another citizen of the community that model the behavior that you want to see, but not having the burden of having to lead every conversation and decide what students are going to be talking about the entire time, you can shape those conversations. So these are topics. But basically, in Yellowdig, students have the ability to bring in what they see what they find relevant to what's going on what they see happening in the world, their own experiences to ask each other's questions. And in fact, they're incentivized by our gameplay learning point system to answer each other's questions. And of course, when they do that, that's such a great learning experience, to look to figure out how to communicate effectively that answer to their peers. In addition, as you probably already know, Yellowdig conversations don't need to end at the end of any particular time. And they can reemerge, they can ebb and flow based on what's needed based on what a student needs or what they see happening in the world related to that. So something if you're having a conversation in week two, and it becomes important again, for some reason, in week six, maybe it ties into another concept, or maybe something happened in the world, that conversation can continue. And it's very easy to do that. Also, multiple conversations can be going on at any particular time. One student may have a question, another student may have an experience that they want to share. So there's a lot more flexibility and organic nature in the Yellowdig. Community. Brian, anything you want to add before?

Brian Verdine 12:16
Yeah, I was gonna say before you move on, I want to just add on top of that, right. So one of the important things about multiple conversations happening and sort of more overall threads going on is that students are have to choose where they want to participate. And what that means is they actually end up consuming a lot more information in the community, they read all of these conversations that are going on, and then they decide where they have the most to add into those conversations. And so that ultimately does two really important things. First of all, students are consuming the information that's being posted at a much higher rate. But they're also participating where they actually have something to add. And so that actually increases the overall quality of those conversations and sort of elevates, the things that are going on in the community. Awesome. Um,

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 13:14
I wanted to just quickly go to my computer will cooperate with me, no Bromley.

There we go. There we go. I just want to make sure before we leave, and do it now that that everyone has the opportunity to record these resources as well. And then we'll jump into the platform and talk about some of the things for getting started. So the first place that you should go if you'd have any questions or any issues that occur is our knowledge base that help.yellowdig.com It's a very well organized and thorough knowledge base. And it's going to answer almost all of your questions, you know, and do it quickly. And again, that's helped.yellowdig.co. And again, as we said before, support yellowdig.com is where you're gonna go for technical issues. This is an example of one of our Level Up series. And we're going to be doing these throughout the semester. Our next set is related to you know, sort of, well, a little bit more of instructor presence, how you can course adjust in the middle of your, your course if things are not where you need them to be. And we'll be happy to answer any of those questions as well. And we have just updated our Yellowdig instructor and designer certification module, which will still take less than an hour, but it's it's fresh and new and it's got all kinds of exciting new information and you can reach that at learn that yellowdig.co

Brian Verdine 14:52
And just to give a little additional plugs of that course. You know we've done some research on sort of outcomes. And the benefits of doing that. And we do see instructors that take that course, getting appreciably better outcomes in the, in the platform. The other thing that we hear as really good feedback from instructors is that most of them learning things that really helped them, save additional time, and maybe some frustration, because they're sort of getting some good tips about how to manage the course, how to increase their presence in a way that students really respond to. And so, definitely recommend it. Even if you use Yellowdig. For a while, we hear that a lot of people will pick up some tips from it. So spread the word.

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 15:44
Absolutely. And I think we can go into the platform now. What we want to talk about is some of the setup issues that, you know, that you should be aware of, and how to manage them, when you join your Yellowdig community when it when it's spawned from your learning management system, assuming that's what you're doing. And by the way, you should click through in fact, is it still in LTI 1.3, that the instructor has to be the first one to click through Brian. Yes, yeah. So you should click through before your course starts that will enroll you in in the course, remember, it needs to be an assignment, even though if you're using LTI 1.3, students no longer have to necessarily click through the assignment link. But that assignment link must live there in order to enable the grade passback. So still create that assignment link. If you're using LTI 1.1, you're going to need to have your students click through that assignment link. Once that happens, your community is going to be spawned, and there's a few things that you need to do to make sure that it's ready to go, you may see this Getting Started flow. And if you do, you'll notice that you have a couple of options here a couple of things that you have to take action on. And the first one is the first day to earn points and the last day to earn points. And I personally like to start with the last day of turn points because that sets the weekly rollover day, whatever day of the week, it is the last data set points that will set the rollover date. And Brian Do you have any insights on on what day of the week that might not be best to be?

Brian Verdine 17:20
Yeah, a lot of people's of course cycles and on Sunday. And and we were I mean, our research indicates that Sunday is probably the worst day to put it on. Because students will tend to wait until the end of the weekend and then sort of all at once try to you know, participate. Our system is really set up to try to encourage them to come in much earlier in the week. And an additional thing that can encourage them to do that is to set a rollover date at something they're less likely to procrastinate to. And we typically recommend actually Friday, because nobody waits until Friday night to do their homework. So it tends to spread out participation all throughout the week. But but really any day of the week other than Sunday would probably be preferable. If you have that flexibility, you know in designing course,

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 18:21
so So those are considerations to put into setting that last day to earn points. The first day to earn points is also important as that sets the length of the first earning period. In other words, every year learning period in Yellowdig is going to be one full week or multiple of that. And we'll get into that in just a minute. But the first week can be longer up to 13 days, because based on the difference between the the day of the week of the first day of the course of the first day turn points in the last day to earn points. So if you want to ease your students in, you can set the earning date. You know, in this case, it's you know, Monday to Wednesday, so there's only two extra days if it went to if you put that on a Friday, for example, it'd be five extra days in that first turning period so you have some flexibility as far as that goes. And I always encourage people to after they've set their earning period, their first and last day to take a look at the actual earning periods to see exactly if they suit what you need. And you can make adjustments to that before your course starts rather than finding out later that it's not exactly as you wanted it to be. The next thing that you'll in make sure this enable participation points is checked as well. The next thing that you'll see in the the Getting Started Guide is a topics now topics are essential for you to create, to allow your students to create those conversations that you want them to engage in, and to allow them to, you know, be able to find what they're looking for and get back into those conversations. And one thing that's relatively new is that you are able, as instructors, as owners of the community, students can't do this, to reorder these topics at any time. And that can create focus, if this week we're talking about personality and research ethics, maybe I want those at the top. And then in a couple of weeks, maybe I'm going to bring up emotional intelligence, and agency and self determination. And what where this will be reflected is in the topic selector, when anyone tries to create a post, this is the order that they will see there. In addition to that, excuse me, you also have the addition of the ability now and you may maybe already know this, to create no point topics simply by clicking point earning disabled. And what that means is that when you do this, the points that students have earned to date on that topic, they will keep, but going forward, they will no longer earn points on that topic, sort of disincentivizing them for them to continue on that topic. If you don't really want them to do that. You can, you can also disable topics. If you don't want students to create any new posts on a particular topic, you can simply disable the topic, it will no longer appear in the in that topic selector. One thing about the no point topics that I think is useful to me, it's great for setting up a class lounge. I also think that the question topic is one that if you turn points off for that one, students can still use it in get points if they use it with a content course concept based topic, which will give you the context of the question, as well as allowing it and knowing that it's a question. So that's one thing that I would recommend. Brian, anything else you wanna add about those? Yeah, the other thing

Brian Verdine 22:03
about topics, I think immediately, popping up a little bit later, too. But we recommend that the topics be subject based. So things like personality research and ethics, not things like module one, you know, week one, and there's a few reasons for that. First of all, we, you know, we want students to sort of blend these topics together, typically, you know, your courses might be isolated weeks, where you're teaching specific parts of a topic, but they need to come, you know, at the end of the course, with a complete understanding about how all of these things relate together. So that's number one. And then if you do things like module one or top topic, you know, week one, students will turn to only talk about that topic in that week, because that's kind of what you're communicating to them. And ultimately, that leads to sort of stunted conversations and a lot of the same problems that we were talking about in sort of weekly topic paradigm where you shift to a new conversation, it kills off a conversation that might just be getting started or, or shouldn't be continuing along.

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 23:14
Really quickly, I just want to point out what remains and the Getting Started flow, there's a few videos that you can watch, that will give you some more insights into what Yellowdig is intending to do and how to do it. And of course, a link to our certification models. And then the last button here, I'm not going to play this right now. But this is a video your students will see when they enter the community. And of course, every setting that you have in the getting started area is also available in settings under points, system topics, etc, and so forth. So that's where you can go if you need any of that information. One of the things, Brian, that that often happens when people are starting a new semester is that they're teaching the same course that they taught before. So do we have any options for those people? Certainly, we're certainly not going to, you know, copy over the entire community that you had before. But But what can we do?

Brian Verdine 24:09
Yeah, so when you launch into Yellowdig, and you're creating a new community, or if you create a community from inside of Yellowdig, it will prompt you to to create that community, you name it, and be able to copy content or settings from previous communities that you've used your own. Also, within the basic settings of every community, there's a template link at the bottom, which you can copy and use to create new communities. So if you're on a team of designers, for example, and you all want to use a similar template, whoever wants to create that template can take these links and share them with other team members or other you know, instructors or whatever to be able to and replicate some of the settings that you have for topics and some of these.

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 25:06
Yeah, so let's be clear about that there are two possibilities that you can bring over, you can and you can bring them both over. The first is content, which will bring over all the posts that you as the instructor have made into the new community and make them live in the new community immediately. The second set,

Brian Verdine 25:25
it's, it's also any posts that were made by a facilitator in this community, so So any, any instructor in the previous meeting, those posts will come over. And it's only pro snap calm.

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 25:42
Right. And in addition to that, drafts will come over as well. When you copy content, your drafts your individual drafts. The second piece is copying settings. And when you copy settings, you get the topics that you had before that can be very useful. The accolades, the points set up. My forgetting anything.

Brian Verdine 26:05
I mean, there's pretty much any setting it's topics, accolades, emojis, disabled them are supposed to, you know, copy over as well. So,

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 26:17
right, so So just realize that that's there for you. There's a great article in the knowledge base, if you want to reiterate, you know, remind yourself of exactly how to do those things. So I encourage you to go there as well. The next thing is setting expectations with your students. You know, if you're new to Yellowdig, which I'm assuming you're here, you probably have been here before. I mean, you've used Yellowdig. Before but but it's we found that it has been primary importance for the instructor to set expectations that this is a different kind of environment than a discussion board that they've been used to, or maybe they haven't been involved in discussion boards or something like that. And so they need to know what, what's going on here. Why are we doing this? What should I expect from the instructor? And what is the instructor expecting for us. And one of the best ways to do this, rather than creating a block of text in a syllabus, or putting in the learning management system is simply to go into Yellowdig itself. And create a short video up to 90 seconds using our our video tool, where you say those things where you tell them, you know, welcome to Yellowdig. We're doing this to have course relevant conversations for you to share the experiences that you have related to the course concepts to ask your questions, you'll get points for answering your peers questions. My role in this community is to be another citizen, I may occasionally post something that I think is interesting, but mostly I'm probably going to comment on your posts and add point bearing accolades to those outstanding posts. So you understand that that's what I'm looking for your goal is to have great conversations with your peers about these quarters concepts, and learn a little bit together and maybe even have a little bit of fun, you can do that really quickly share some of your passion for the subject matter. And, you know, students will do that, and they'll start to see this is what's supposed to be going on in that community. Anything you want to add to that? Brian?

Brian Verdine 28:21
Um, no, I just think maybe it's it's, it's really important in terms of, you know, students having their expectations met have you that you're unclear about sort of how you are going to put his feet. And I think in a lot of cases, instructors aren't clear about that with their students, they're sort of more likely to be clear with students about what their expectations are of the students. But I think it's super helpful if students are also told what their expectations should be

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 28:52
of you. Absolutely. So they know what to expect that so they know that you are not obligated to read every single post or comment on every single post or anything like that. Just let them know that and there'll be a lot more comfortable. Couple things, I want to talk about points in just a minute to make sure that everyone has their heads fully around that and understands it. But I want to point out two things. Again, I mentioned before that you can access the entirety of the knowledge base and also Yellowdig support simply by clicking this little question mark button you want to access support, simply scroll down and it'll be right there, contact us by email. I also want to point out that announcements as to new features in Yellowdig will be right here on this little gift box icon so you can always stay up to date by checking that out. So let's talk a little bit about points because we know that Yellowdig points are different than Gradebook points and sometimes that, you know, it's important that students have a good understanding of that. So Yellowdig Bryan how many assignments have over the course of semesters? One assignment is one assignment over the course of the entire semester. And basically, students have to earn all their Yellowdig points by that particular by the end of the semester. Now, if you're following our defaults, you're going to be in our standard setup, which includes a weekly point limiter. And the way Yellowdig calculates the amount of points under our defaults that students need to earn over the course of the semester is to count the number of weeks and multiply it by 1000. So on a 10 week course, that would lead to 10,000 points, obviously, that's not the same currency and that's in your gradebook. And for your full understanding, you know, Yellowdig will pass back the points that students earn and convert it into whatever the weighted formula in your gradebook is, for those points by passing a proportion back the number of points that students have earned to date over the number of points that they could have earned to that particular date. So at the end of week one, if a student has earned all 1000 points, and 1000 out of 1000, what's going to pass back to the gradebook, right,

Brian Verdine 31:12
they'll have 100%, and their grand will be whatever you assign the LOD to be worth in the gradebook.

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 31:19
And what happens on the rollover day. On the rollover the

Brian Verdine 31:24
target extends to include the next week and how many points the student will need. And so their grade will drop in the Learning Management System Gradebook accordingly. And as soon as they participate for that coming week, they can get their grade right back up to 100%. And see their grading and pretty book back at that level.

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 31:49
So some, you know, considering that the LOD grade isn't really earned until entirely until the end of the semester, some instructors are more comfortable having students rely on the Yellowdig point widget which is right here to always be up to date on exactly where they are and muting that gradebook in the learning management system until the end of the semester. I want to make sure that we have enough time for everything. Just really quickly, quick reiteration of how points work there are two concepts of points. The first concept is students earn points for for creating content, whether that's a post or comment. And the second concept is they get points for the interactions they receive. In other words, if students want to maximize their point value, they need to create good content so that they get more points from their peers. And we put a very value on commenting in fact, her word more on commenting than we do for posting to encourage deeper conversations. And, you know, Brian, you want to talk about accolades a little bit.

Brian Verdine 33:04
Yeah, so the accolades are those little break icons, you're seeing in the top left of the posts, and you can name them whatever you want, you can make them worth as many points as you want. But the point of them is that you can award them to students who are doing exemplary job of the things that you want to encourage inside of your community. And so as you're reading things, and to me, a quick way to give students feedback is just to add those accolades to post some comments. And, you know, give students a point, Bob, if you want them to have have one, you can make accolades that are worth nothing and just give sort of a visual recognition. But at the end of the day, there's a few that we really like, and Bob's kind of highlighting now. So I'll talk about them the Medal of bravery was one that we heard up, you know, instructor using, for any student passionate, something that was a little bit sort of, I don't know what the word is.

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 34:07
Personally revealing, perhaps, yes,

Brian Verdine 34:09
yeah. And so were, you know, he wanted to sort of encourage people sharing things that are personal to them, because he felt like it helped everybody feel more comfortable with each other and really learn some lessons that otherwise wouldn't come out. So that's what I was, like, bother only really like, is a verified response activity. So if you're allowing students to answer, ask and answer each other's questions in the community, using that verified response accolade on those responses that you want to highlight for all of the students is a great way to show people what you think is sort of a good answer to those questions. And because of the accolades can all be used as filters, you can just click on those accolades inside of of the community or through the menu there on the right, you can filter down to see just those accolades, which allows you to look at all of the verified responses.

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 35:11
We only have a few more minutes left. So there's a couple other things I want to talk about reminders. By default, Yellowdig will be sending your students reminders for low, if they haven't been in the community for a particular period of time, you can enable that or disable that this is our default cadence. And when they get those reminders, it will tell them not you know, you're a bad person. But instead, here's something in the community that you might find interesting that you should come in and check out and you'll be able to see the status of who's getting them and who just received them. Another thing that I think is really important, and that is overlooked, just far too much for my taste is setting up your own profile, again, to model behavior, add your own picture, put your name and as opposed to being user at 2263 at you know, so and so.edu or something like that. And you can do that simply by clicking on the little avatar at the bottom left, and going to my profile and being able to manage that you can also manage all of your notification settings in there as well. Very simple to to deal with. But I think it's pretty important. Also, you know, while our data shows that it is definitely a better for you, as an instructor to increase interaction with community to comment, rather than to be constantly posting in the community. I think it's worth saying that at the outset of the community, it's a really good idea for you to model some exemplar posts of what you're looking forward to and to get the conversations going, in other words, bring in as opposed to asking a prompt that everyone all has to answer, do a poll or, or bring in an article that you think is important for them, that you'd like to encourage them to do the same type of thing in the community. And remember, again, your role is to model behavior. And frankly, I think you're going to enjoy it. You know, we have a few minutes left, actually six minutes left, I know that we're going to be kicked out promptly at that time. So I want to say one other thing. And then and then open it up for questions. And that's after this session, I will be in the Yellowdig success team booth, if you have any further questions, since we can't sit here and answer them. So feel free to to join me there. Brian, anything you'd like to add?

Brian Verdine 37:31
Now I'm curious to see if anybody has any questions. I'm sure we could talk endlessly about additional things. But if anybody needs any clarification on anything we did or has their own questions.

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 37:47
I know we spoke a little fast, but you know, the way it goes sometimes, you know, and remember, you know, you can add topics at any time. If you look, if you're looking at the data for your topics, and you're finding that students are spending a particular amount of time, you know, maybe on one topic rather than others, maybe that means that that topic is a little too general. So maybe you create a new topic that breaks it down a little bit more. You can also it's occasionally worthwhile to look at the Community Health in the conversation ratio, which is the number of posts the number of comments, this is a very low number for Yellowdig. Actually, we'd like to see that a little bit higher. But this is a demo community. And our membership report is also something that can be useful for you to check occasionally as your course is going on, which will give you further insights into exactly the type of behaviors your students are engaging in. And you know, who's doing the most in the community? For example, who's given the most comments, you know that that's some it's important role in the community. And it could be you it could be a student, so very useful to check that from time to time.

Brian Verdine 39:05
In looking at this data. You know, one thing that I think there's a data column about orphan posts. And what that essentially means is, you know, if students are creating a post, and then nobody is responding to it, it will count as an orphan post that, that that concept sort of came out of the idea that a lot of sort of standard discussion forums, people post them, nobody ever responds to it. And so if you're noticing that a student is posting a lot, but then he's not really getting very much of a response from students, that's a student that I might look a little bit more carefully at sort of what they're doing and how they're trying to interact with others and maybe they need some some help in tips in sort of knowing how to compose their posts or whatever. But that I think, is one good indicator quick indicator of students that might be struggling on They are trying to participate, but are really, you know, not successfully interacting with others.

Bob Ertischek, Head of Client Success, Yellowdig 40:09
And I want to point out that this report with this and all that other information you can download as a CSV, which may make it a little bit easier to sort of consume. As far as that goes. I also want to add, once again, that we are here for you, our success team is invested in your success, that we want to be your partners we want to help you get what you need. So hopefully this is the beginning of the conversation rather than the end of it. And thank you for your attention. And again, we'll stick around until the lights go out here and then I'll be in the success team room so if you have any questions so now so now is pretty good time. And if not, we wish you excellent luck in your semester and have a great experience.