Design Principles for Templating and Default Communities

December 12, 2025

Design Principles for Templating and Default Communities

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.

IN THIS ARTICLE

Default Community

Template Community

Default Communities and Community Templates are not required, but you can use them to add more customization and potentially save community owners time during setup. Templating is flexible, and there are several methods that we’ll outline below. Choose the method(s) which best fit your needs, and feel free to get in touch with our academic team for additional help at support@yellowdig.com.

First off, Default communities pass on both Settings and Content to new communities, while Template communities can pass on Settings and/or Content.

Screen_Shot_2023-03-22_at_1.54.03_PM.png

** Copy content publishes all posts on day 1 of community and attributes them to the new community owner. The exception is that drafted posts will remain in the owner’s drafts.

Default Community

⚠️CAUTION

You need Organization Admin permissions to create or edit the Default Community. Contact support@yellowdig.com for help.

Default Community(s) are the primary option designers use to customize Yellowdig across their institution. Design the Default Community(s) to meet the specific needs of your program.

Default communities pass on both Settings and Content to new communities (see the table above for details). Only one Default Community can be created per Organization level. Top-level organization Defaults will pass down to the sub-organizations. However, the sub-organizations can have their own Default communities as well.

When instructors create a new community inside an organization that has a Default Community, the new community will automatically inherit both the settings and content from the Default. If there’s no Default Community, new communities will automatically inherit Yellowdig’s Defaults; so out of the box, communities get all of Yellowdig’s default best practices.

How to create a Default Community

Go to Organization Settings – Defaults – Click the Create Default Community button. The video below demonstrates this.

💡Pro Tip

In the community creation flow, instructors can override the Default by choosing to copy settings from a Template community.

In both examples below, the top-level organization is called “State University”, and underneath that, there are two sub-organizations for the schools of “Arts & Sciences” and “Engineering”.

The chart below shows only one Default Community for the top-level “State University” organization. The settings and content automatically get inherited by the sub-organizations.

The chart below shows the scenario with three distinct Default Communities, one for each organization.

Template Community

Instructors can use Template Communities to copy the settings and/or content from a previous Yellowdig community. Under most use cases, community content is not copied, but settings may be.

During community creation, there are two ways to copy settings & content (shown in the screenshot below):

Paste a template link. You must use this option if you don’t own the community you’re templating from. Copy the template link in the source community’s basic settings.

2. Select the community from a dropdown by clicking the field under Copy Content From and/or Copy Settings From. Only communities owned by the user will show as options here.

More details

Copy Content

Only Posts and Comments from Community Owners and Facilitators will be copied, and you will assume ownership of those Posts and Comments upon content copying.

If you choose not to copy the content, your new Community will inherit the default posts of your Organization’s Default Community. If your Organization does not have a Default Community, and if no parents of your Organization have default Communities, your new Community will inherit Yellowdig’s default “Welcome to Yellowdig” posts, which feature how-to guides.

If there is a Topic on a post from a Community Owner or Facilitator ONLY those Topics will get copied (unless settings are copied as well).

Copy Settings

Community settings include Point Configurations, Accolades, Topics, and Emojis. Community settings do not include the community start and end dates.

If you choose not to copy settings, your new Community will inherit the default settings of your Organization’s Default Community. If your Organization does not have a default community, and if no parents of your Organization have default communities, your new Community will inherit Yellowdig’s Defaults.

Archived Communities

Important: You cannot copy settings or content from an archived community.

Archived communities will not appear in the dropdown menu when creating a new community.

Template links from archived communities will also not function.

If you want to reuse a community’s settings, you must un-archive the community first. Click here to learn about managing archived communities.

Audience: This help article is for Instructors, Designers, and Administrators. Students or Learners do not have access to these settings.

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.

December 12, 2025