December 30, 2020

10 things to know about Yellowdig from 2020

Unlocking Student Motivation with Gameful Learning

Instructors everywhere face the same uphill climb: getting students to participate meaningfully—especially in online classes. Despite your best efforts, traditional discussion forums can feel more like boxes to check than places for real learning. What’s the antidote? For many educators, the answer is gameful learning.

What is Gameful Learning?

Gameful learning isn’t about turning your classroom into an arcade. It’s about applying the elements of games—clear goals, meaningful choice, and immediate feedback—to academic environments. Platforms like Yellowdig use points, badges, and accolades to recognize real contributions, making participation feel rewarding, not obligatory.

Why Gameful Elements Spark Engagement

Why do students respond so well to this approach? Because gameful mechanics tap into motivation in ways that rote assignments can’t. When students earn points for thoughtful posts or insightful replies, they're encouraged to dig deeper and share experiences. A little friendly competition doesn’t hurt, either—leaderboards spark engagement and help shy students ease into participation.

Yellowdig’s Approach: More Than Just Points

Yellowdig’s platform is built around the idea that engagement should be authentic, not forced. Points aren’t given for empty “I agree” comments, but for contributions that spark conversation and critical thinking. Students can curate their posts with articles or videos that interest them and receive recognition when others interact with their content. This approach fosters intrinsic motivation—students participate because they want to, not because they have to.

Real Results in Real Classrooms

Instructors using Yellowdig consistently report stronger participation and deeper discussion. One faculty member noted that “seventy-five percent of student questions get answered by their peers,” freeing up their time to tackle more advanced topics. Students say they look forward to checking new posts, sharing resources, and earning recognition for meaningful contributions.

Tips for Making Gameful Learning Work

  1. Set Clear Expectations: Let students know how points are earned and celebrate thoughtful interaction, not just frequency.
  2. Offer Meaningful Feedback: Use accolades and comments to highlight particularly insightful posts.
  3. Encourage Creativity: Remind students they can use links, visuals, or even short videos to make their posts stand out.
  4. Foster Healthy Competition: Leaderboards and weekly challenges can energize participation and keep momentum going.

The Takeaway

Gameful learning turns participation from a chore into an opportunity for discovery and community. With the right design, recognition, and tools, you’ll see students take more ownership of their learning—unlocking not just better engagement, but genuine excitement for the subject.
Ready to see how gameful learning can transform your course? Try out Yellowdig and join a thriving community that believes learning should be as rewarding as it is rigorous.

Yellowdig is an Education Technology Company Driving Change in Virtual Classrooms

This year has been a whirlwind for the entire world, and the education industry has had its own unique challenges. Here at Yellowdig, that was no exception. Although this year had it’s clear challenges for everyone, including the EdTech space, our team was able to come together and persevere.

We listened to what the education market’s needs were as they changed throughout the year and worked very hard to adapt with offerings that would help to lessen the difficulty of teaching and learning during this trying year.

We helped professors who were accustomed to teaching fully in person classes maintain and often increase engagement among students while transitioning to remote or hybrid classes. Below are a few highlights from the year.

  1. 1. We quickly adapted to the needs of the education industry as the pandemic hit. Our team created the free pilot offering from scratch from feedback in the market and will continue to expand it in 2021.

2. We have had incredible growth within current partnerships, with many clients up 200-300% (or more) in usage year over year.

3. Our Client Success team onboarded 4x more users for Fall 2020 than any previous semester.

4. Yellowdig Engage scaled to 30k user posts per day.

5 .In a year when many companies had to lay off employees, we are lucky to have been able to add 9 new team members in 2020 and have an additional team member joining in January of 2021.

Client Success – We added roles to tactically address user needs. ⭐ Jon Miron – Client Success Onboarding Specialist ⭐Bob Ertischek – Academic Lead ⭐Ravi Theja – Client Success Associate Development ⭐Brandon Wong – Full Stack Developer ⭐Rodrigo Mantica – Frontend Developer Marketing ⭐Deb Bolton – CMO (contract) ⭐Brianna Bannach – Growth Marketing Associate ⭐Julian B. – Growth Marketing Associate Partnerships ⭐Gerry Meyle – Associate Partnership Manager ⭐Jim Gandolfo – Education Partnerships Manager

6. Our team published our first E-Book. Our Efficacy E-Book that released in October shares data-driven success stories from many of our partners including Arizona State University, showing increased engagement and retention.

7. Our development team made immense improvements to the application. With most of our partners transferred over to the Engage platform as we plan to sunset Yellowdig Classic completely by Summer 2021, our focus was to improve the user experience for the application. Working steadily throughout the year to fix bugs and improve the feel of the platform, the year culminated with the big releases of a Freeform Points System and a navigational redesign for a cleaner feel. Learn more about these releases in our December 2020 Product Update.

8. We launched the Courseware Licensing model with increased flexibility for partners.

9. We have tightened the feedback loops between Client Success and Development teams leading to great impact on a number of extremely useful features (e.g., Point Displays, Grade Passback pages, student sync button).

10. Our point system received a patent!

We look forward to all of the opportunities 2021 will bring to continue our growth and to help our partners to create a positive impact in the world of education. We are optimistic that the upcoming year will be full of continued innovation with strong communities of students and faculty supporting each other to create better educational and experiential outcomes.

Keep an eye out for exciting happenings in the near future like our upcoming Yellowdig Awards!

We wish you a happy and healthy New Year from everyone on the Yellowdig team!

Any questions? Please reach out to LearnMore@yellowdig.com and we’d be happy to speak with you!

Keep reading
Yellowdig
Want a Yellowdig Community that doesn’t suck? Follow our best practices.

In 2020, we created a composite Community Health metric that captures four key dimensions of student engagement and achievement. Along the way, we confirmed something we already knew: instructors who use many of our best practices have Communities that perform significantly better than instructors who use fewer. Over the past 3 years, we’ve continued to […]

Product Updates
Yellowdig Engage Product Update 2/19

Features: Password complexity checking. This strengthens the security of users’ accounts. Post reply-to threading UI. This distinguishes replies to comments from replies to posts, making it easier to read and track long conversations. Avatar hover card. This allows users to follow and directly message each other by hovering over their picture in the feed. Interactive […]

Student Success
The Textbook’s Crumbling Monopoly

But that is no longer the case today. The textbook’s monopoly on knowledge is crumbling (if it hasn’t already). Scan any university campus or peek in on any dorm room and you will see fewer books. Why? Well aside from the astronomically inflated cost of textbooks at campus bookstores, the model in which students acquire […]

See Yellowdig in Action Today

Experience how effortless engagement and real community can transform your classroom or campus. Book your personalized walkthrough—no pressure, just real results.