January Product Update

January 27, 2022

January Product Update

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.

Catch the latest in Yellowdig's Engage platform

We’ve had a slew of updates to our Engage platform this past month, and we want to share what they are and why they were implemented. Every update is live in the platform, so go check them out!

Points Communication Improvements

Improved points system

Thanks to the upcoming points and grade communication improvements, understanding the points system is more accessible than ever. Enhancements to the points widget and participation page make it easy for members to know how many points they have, how much they have to earn, and how to meet (and exceed!) community expectations.

An updated point widget at the top-right shows students their total points earned, their pace for the current earning Period, and a brightly colored status banner that shows them exactly what is expected for their participation.

Additionally, a new point details modal unites all other communications about points and how to earn them into a single area. Learners can easily view this without losing their current place on the community page. The modal includes a new log with additional details, arranged by period and sorted in reverse chronological order. This includes a running tally of grade changes.

Why we created the feature

Our point system is a powerful way to improve the quantity and quality of learner participation. To work best, learners must understand what is expected of them and how participation helps them achieve their goals. Our latest point communication changes are part of a larger set of improvements to enhance the student experience and encourage more quality participation.

Bookmarked Conversations

Save conversations for later

With the new bookmarks feature, you can now easily save conversations that you want to reference later on. For example, you can bookmark conversations you want to bring up in class. Students can use bookmarks to save study materials or conversations they wish to return to.

Bookmarked posts are accessible via the star icons in the left-hand menus. The leftmost menu bookmark icon takes you to a page with bookmarks from across all your communities. And the bookmark icon that’s in the second menu from the left takes you to all the bookmarks for the community you’re in.

Why we created the feature

The dynamic, scrolling feed in communities is an essential part of what helps Yellowdig inspire good conversations. But since communities are not static, your favorite posts and comments will often move on you between visits. The new bookmarks feature helps you quickly mark and find all of your favorite posts or comments.

(Another way to find any conversation in a community is with the Search, Filter, Sort functions.)

Student Onboarding Flow

A video to introduce students to Yellowdig

When students first enter Yellowdig, they now have the opportunity to view a brief introductory walkthrough video. This quickly tells them the educational benefits and purpose of Yellowdig and provides a high-level explanation of how it works.

Why we created the video

Over the years, we have noted what helps students the most when getting started on the platform. We hope that sharing this video will help you to explain Yellowdig to your students and excite them to participate!

Topics Without Points Feature

Casual conversations

Instructors can now enable casual conversations in a Yellowdig community without awarding points for them. They can also disable points to nudge students to move on from a topic (e.g., introductions).

This feature ensures that conversations around particular topics are still possible but that learners will only earn points related to “on-topic” conversations that their community facilitators wish to remain active.

Community owners and facilitators can disable points on specific topics by navigating to Settings -> Topics -> then clicking “EDIT” on a topic. Then to disable points, click the toggle switch for “Disable Points” and click the “SAVE CHANGES” button.

When a topic has points disabled, the topic tag will appear white, and only the text and outline will be colored.

Why we created the feature

This enhancement gives students more freedom to have conversations with their peers, while ensuring that only course-relevant student participation is awarded points towards a grade.

Working to make your user experience better

We want to give you access to the best user experience with Yellowdig Engage, and we will continue to publish product updates to keep you in the loop. You can also get read about updates to the platform by clicking on the gift icon on the left-hand side toolbar inside Yellowdig Engage. See you next month.

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See Yellowdig in Action Today

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January 27, 2022