New Update: Reminders and Notifications!

June 23, 2021

New Update: Reminders and Notifications!

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

Set Clear Expectations: Let students know how points are earned and celebrate thoughtful interaction, not just frequency.
Offer Meaningful Feedback: Use accolades and comments to highlight particularly insightful posts.
Encourage Creativity: Remind students they can use links, visuals, or even short videos to make their posts stand out.
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.

We have some amazing updates coming up this Summer!

Changes to Yellowdig’s reminders and notifications can be configurable within your Yellowdig Community and will be released on June 28th.

At Yellowdig, we value the feedback from our unique instructor and faculty experiences, these updates are coming directly from your feedback, thank you! We’re hoping you like the changes and as always please give us feedback at clientsuccess@yellowdig.com.

Learn about the 2 improvements to Yellowdig’s Virtual Classroom that are releasing this June

Reminders Feature

What we did: Students will now get notified after a period of inactivity. They have the option to get these notifications through their email, through in-app notifications, or both. These notifications are automatic, so instructors are not required to do anything. The default time period of inactivity is five days, after which students will get notified, but instructors have the option to change this cadence. Even if students log in to the app, if they do not interact with any posts, that counts as inactivity.

Why we did it: Yellowdig is designed to support active, student driven communities where students converse freely, share knowledge and become intrinsically motivated to learn from one another. Therefore, users should be treating the platform just like other social media platforms — logging in and scrolling through the feed, reacting or commenting on posts that interest them. By having reminder notifications, we aim to encourage students to login more frequently, and create a habit of logging into the platform on a regular basis.

It is also to ensure that instructors have an easier time managing engagement in their communities. Instead of having to send out multiple emails manually, the platform will do everything for them. Of course, instructors can still send out individual emails or messages, as well as change the frequency for the reminder notifications.

Notification Settings Updates

What we did: Users will now be able to further customize their notifications with many new included settings.You will now be able to have different notification settings for different communities. Additionally, navigating to your notifications page will be easier because it will be placed in the main left sidebar. We also revamped the notification settings page — goodbye clunky square toggles, hello smoother round toggles.

Why we did it: No one likes a noisy inbox! Whether you are an instructor for multiple communities or just a guest instructor, these customizable settings are to help maintain where and when you’ll get notified on activity within your various communities. The change in design also makes the page more aesthetically pleasing, so we hope users take advantage of the customizability of the new notification options.

If you have any issues, please contact us at support@yellowdig.com, and we will be happy to assist you.

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June 23, 2021