Yellowdig Academy
Resources for people brand new to Yellowdig, experienced Yellowdig leaders, and everyone in-between!
Navigate Yellowdig Academy by selecting the desired area below
These resources are for Yellowdig Engage (Yellowdig in Courses)
Designing Yellowdig Communities
Yellowdig Community Concept
Yellowdig works best as a space to create a community for your learners that:
1. Acts as an additional resource to support their learning from all other parts of your course.
2. Allows learners to receive support and assistance from fellow learners.
3. Enables you to see and understand what students may be struggling with and provides a means to support more students more easily.
The words “discussion” and “discussion board” have existing and mostly negative meanings to most students. Try not to refer to Yellowdig as a discussion and use community instead.
Consider the Yellowdig assignment a participation grade. Information shared in Yellowdig works very well as a formative assessment that informs you both about what students know and do not know. Using Yellowdig as a summative assessment negatively impacts student interactions and reduces voluntary participation. With our recommended point setup, most users find making Yellowdig participation equivalent to 10% - 20% of their overall grade provides good initial motivation to get the ball rolling.
Convert Any Existing Prompts:
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Identify current discussion questions that can be transformed into assignments (e.g., quizzes, papers, reflections).
Add Yellowdig to the LMS:
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Ensure that Yellowdig is easily accessible within the LMS.
Update the Gradebook:
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Consolidate Yellowdig grades into a single grade item instead of weekly discussion grades
Define Topic Tags and Accolades:
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Decide on appropriate topic tags and accolades to organize and reward engagement.
Set clear expectations for learners:
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Inform students that the focus is on interaction, not just content generation.
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Explain that not every student needs to create a new post; meaningful engagement is key.
Traditional Discussion Boards Vs. Yellowdig: A Comparative Analysis
Design
Engagement
Interaction
Assessment
Flexibility
Motivation
Content Creation
Feedback
Community Building
Learning Outcomes
Traditional Discussion Boards
Fixed threads and posts, often with rigid deadlines
Students respond to instructor prompts
Limited peer-to-peer interaction
Graded based on individual posts and responses
Limited flexibility
Extrinsically motivated by grades
Instructor-driven
Primarily instructor feedback
Limited sense of community
Focus on responding to specific prompts
Fluid, ongoing conversations with flexible participation
Students create posts, comment, and interact organically
High level of peer-to-peer interaction and community building
Graded on overall engagement and contributions
Highly flexible
Intrinsically motivated by social learning
Student-driven with guidance from the instructor
Peer and instructor feedback in real-time
Strong sense of community through ongoing interaction
Focus on collaborative learning and knowledge sharing
Course and Community Design
Allow learners to lead conversations without needing to create prompts for them to respond to.
Create course relevant Topics that shape community conversations.
Set clear expectations in your LMS on how and why you are using Yellowdig.
Engage with your learners through commenting, adding reactions, and awarding accolades.
Learning Management System Integration
If Applicable
Use one graded assignment link.
Publish the navigation link to Yellowdig to allow the easiest access.
Set your graded assignment link to Yellowdig to open in a new window or tab. It avoids some student access problems caused by browser settings.
If using grade passback, do not invite students other ways. They need to launch from the graded assignment link in your LMS course to create the grade passback.
💡 Additional tips You may decide to hide or mute the grade item and exclude it from the final calculated grade until a few weeks after the term has begun. This addresses any larger fluctuations learners may experience in their Yellowdig grade. You can add reminders to participate in Yellowdig in the calendar or other area of the LMS that sends notifications to students.
Points
🗓️ You will need to enter the start and end dates for when learners can earn points. The end date you choose will be the weekly roll over day that resets the maximum students can earn each period and will allow them to start earning points again.
🗣️ Share information with learners on how the point system works.
🦃 If desired, merge earning periods to accommodate term breaks or if you would like to provide more time for learners to earn points.
🏁 The Standard (YD recommended) point system is typically ready to go as your “Participation Expectation” when you create your Yellowdig community. For first time users, we strongly recommend starting with our Standard Participation Expectation. It is backed by years of research to increase voluntary engagement. Tweak it in future terms if you want to alter your initial results.
Starting Your Community
👋 Before your learners enter the community, create a welcoming post that sets expectations about the purpose of the Yellowdig community, what learners should expect from you in the community, and what you expect from learners in the community.
During...
Keep your community on track with these strategies
1. Make sure Yellowdig is not a side-show 🎭 First and foremost, Yellowdig Engage is designed to be an organic and connected learning community which is used as part of a course in tandem with synchronous sessions (if any) and the LMS. It is not meant to be an isolated part of a course and learners should not be expected to be the only ones connecting the community to the course. It can be a place where students interact with each other to learn with each other and where they can find agency to ask the questions they have, as well as share any personal experiences or things they see happening in the world that are course or concept relevant (e.g., news articles, videos, etc.). This helps students better connect with the material, as well as providing relevance and making abstract concepts more accessible with real world examples. Yellowdig communities work best when they do not exist in a vacuum. Yellowdig should be a vital and synergistic piece of the entire course experience and students shouldn’t feel they can complete the class and get everything it has to offer without participating. Finding ways of bringing Yellowdig into other aspects of the course and bringing other aspects of the course into Yellowdig will remind students and increase their initial rates of participation.
2. Set expectations and explain the value to students 📣 It's important to set explicit expectations with students at the outset of the community around the purpose of the community, the instructor’s role in the community, and what students should and should not do. Yellowdig is a different experience than a discussion board, so it can be very helpful to spell this out clearly and reduce the ambiguity of being in a new environment. [See the welcome video script above for an example] Though it is important to set expectations in the course design and community, it is also important to do it in a way that makes Yellowdig sound like a useful and helpful place, not just another thing to do with a ton of rules governing how they participate.
3. Model behavior for students 💻 Your students are likely new to Yellowdig and may be more used to traditional discussion boards, or may not have participated in an online course previously. As Yellowdig is something entirely different, and as mentioned above, letting them know at the outset and reducing ambiguity is an important step in introducing them to the Yellowdig community. Yellowdig communities work best when the instructors model the behavior they want to see rather than leading every conversation. Yellowdig and the gameful learning point system, as well as Yellowdig Topics, are designed to encourage course-relevant, organic student conversations, rather than rigid weekly prompted discussions with all students answering the same question each week. When a new course cohort is starting, the instructors can model the type of posts that they wish to have students produce. That might mean sharing intro posts, with videos of the instructor and TAs, if any, who will be participating in the community. Sharing those can encourage students to create their own intro posts. Introduction posts are also a wonderful and easy way for students to get their feet wet in the platform and start earning points. They will also start to get to know each other and feel more comfortable interacting with each other. Sharing an occasional course-related news article will provide further guidance to students and encourage them to share similar items.
4. Comment more, post less 💬 Our data shows a correlation between instructor commenting (not posting) and student participation. In other words, commenting by the instructor tends to lead to more student participation, likely because instructors that interact with their students are more likely to be helpful and will be seen by students as more present, more engaged in what the students are doing, and more responsive to what students need. Instructor posting is often more about communicating specific content or information to students, which may be valuable in its own right, but often does not feel as responsive to students and may “miss” in sharing what they actually care about or need. Thus, beyond initial or occasional posts to share information or model the type of posts that students should try to emulate instructors should consider commenting on student posts when that will extend a valuable conversation, for example when that post isn't getting traction it deserves, or if the instructor wants to add a new perspective to an existing post. Of course, the instructors should feel free to post occasional course information, questions and polls for students, but not requiring all students to answer any particular question. It is a good practice to have students have optionality in responding to those questions, and they should be encouraged to start their own posts or reply to their peers' posts, rather than having everyone reply to the instructor post. (Using “No-Point” Yellowdig topics when instructor posts can assist with this.) A strong instructor presence is a vital way to build toward a successful Yellowdig community, but that presence does not need to be achieved only through having a regular slate of posts. When posting, it’s suggested for the instructor to use a “no-point” Topic to encourage students to start their own conversations, rather than continuing the thread from the instructor.
5. Utilize Accolades 🌟 Another valuable and easy way to model behavior is the thoughtful use of Yellowdig point-bearing Accolades to recognize outstanding posts and/or comments that you want other students to emulate. Consider using specific accolades to recognize specific types of encouraged behavior. The Verified Response Accolade can be used to point out the best student submitted answer to any student question and can then be an effective tool to create a study guide for students. It also can help alleviate the burden of instructor’s answering all student questions.
6. Bring students back to the community 🤝 As noted above, making the Yellowdig community a vital and synergistic part of the course will provide value and motivation for students and also encourage them to participate. One good way to connect Yellowdig more to any course is by using Permalinks from the community. Permalinks are available on every Yellowdig post and comment (click the “...” menu at the top right of any post or comment.). They offer a one click journey (plus login, if necessary) to any individual post or comment that the instructor’s want to share with the community and they can be an effective tool to drive students back into the community. They can be easily copied to share outside of the Yellowdig community in any other course communications or materials. Sharing key Yellowdig conversations in emails to students, synchronous sessions, or even on the LMS page can create interest, show value, and point students back to the community. It also helps show that those running the courses care about what is happening in the community and are treating it as an indispensable part of the course.
How to improve your community once it's in motion - addressing common questions that come up:
👀 Students are having trouble finding things in the feed
This problem is often reported when the instructor is posting a prompt and telling students to participate by replying to their post. Yellowdig’s feed was designed so that active conversations pop back to the top, which means the most recent posts and most interesting conversations are typically near the top. If students only reply to instructor posts, the instructor post stays at the top and replies accumulate in long strings underneath it. That means that individual student contributions and their resulting conversations are never bubbled back to the top of the feed. Also any conversations that do emerge get lost in the really long strings of comments and replies. Though we do not recommend prompting as the primary way to approach community building, if you periodically want everyone to talk about a single theme then an approach that works is to create a topic tag for it and tell students to use the relevant topic tag as they start new conversations (i.e., post) about that theme. For those who are trying to use prompts from a standard discussion board, here are some pointers on how to turn those prompts into conversation themes in Yellowdig that will work well to build a strong and engaged community.
For those who are trying to use prompts from a standard discussion board, here are some pointers on how to turn those prompts into conversation themes in Yellowdig that will work well to build a strong and engaged community.
Thoughtful topic usage is key! 🔑 Good use of Topics makes a very considerable impact on students finding information. Use descriptive Topics and make it required to add a topic as students post. Students reporting that they are having trouble finding things is most common when instructors are not using or not requiring topics at all. Or when they are using topics that are not actual topics (e.g., “Week 1” vs. “Amortization” or “Schizophrenia”).
This article will help with creating Topics.
Make sure students know about the search functionality, that the search can be combined with any of the feed filters, and feed filters can be combined to find increasingly specific things.
🤯 The feed feels overwhelming to me or my students
How you communicate the purpose of Yellowdig to students and how you think about your own role in the community can help it feel less daunting. We hear this feedback less often in classes that are small (100 students). This is because when a class is small it is possible to keep up with reading everything. People who think they have to do that are able to keep up. When a class is large, students and instructors usually implicitly understand that they cannot read everything. They don’t try to. Instead they are more likely to treat Yellowdig like a social media feed; they visit more often for shorter times, pay attention to what is new or what recently is getting attention at the top of their feed, interact a little bit, and then leave. Mid-size communities are often where the feed feels overwhelming because students and instructors may think they are expected to read everything, but it is realistically too much to read. So what is the solution? - Focus everyone, including yourself, on the real goal of your community. We hope most communities are to inspire good conversations around topics that help learning. To achieve that goal nobody needs to hear and be part of every conversation. Like breakout discussions in a class, you do not need to hear everything they say and they do not need to hear everything the other groups say to derive value from them. In class sizes over 30, the experience will feel more manageable to everyone if it is understood that neither you nor they will be responsible for reading absolutely everything. 💡 You can further help make the experience feel more comfortable if you help highlight the truly important things for students: - Pin important posts to the top for a while, so everyone sees them. - Create and reserve an accolade that you use specifically for highlighting the most important things so students can filter by them (e.g., one professor uses a “Test” accolade to indicate posts he might use for a test question). 🚨If your students really need or want to get your attention (or that of another specific person), suggest they use the @mention feature.
✋🏽Students are posting but they are not engaging with the content
Increase the points for comments, decrease the points for posts, and make sure you are using a good number of "social points" so that students who start and maintain conversations with peers are rewarded.
Relevance is important for getting students engaged in a conversation. They are more likely to talk about things which focus on topics or themes that are meaningful for their lives at the current moment. This is one of many reasons we recommend always allowing students to bring their own content into the platform to talk about. As hip and cool as you may be (and we know you must be if you’re using Yellowdig!), students are probably more likely than you to share things that are interesting to other students and really timely or relevant to them. If you feel the things they bring to talk about are not relevant to the course, you can always use comments, accolades, or points (addition or subtraction) to encourage more relevance to the course.
📚 My students are not generating quality content
Mainly we recommend modeling the behavior you want to see in the community. You can even explicitly tell students “this is the kind of posting and commenting I expect.” When you see students doing the right things, acknowledge them and communicate regularly what you see going well and not so well, so that students know what you want going forward.
Decrease points for posts relative to comments so that students are not compelled to simply post because it is worth more. You can then also give more points for receiving reactions and comments on posts, so that posts only earn more points when they are good and get good conversations started.These changes can help further drive home the point that sharing interesting content that drives good conversation is the goal and more important than simply generating a certain # of posts.
Review the community topics and see if they are inviting of everything you'd want shared, while still being a concise list (remember students will be scrolling through these each time they post). We don't typically recommend changing topics mid-course (data around them will be lost and they’ll be removed if you delete them) but adding topics or taking a different approach in the future may help. If students are asking more questions than providing their insights, you might also consider changing the ordering of topics in future communities so the ones you want more students to consider show first.
😳 Students sometimes “borrow” too much from one another or other resources
Because context is so important in real, back-and-forth conversations and because the “style” is often different from other forms of text (like a news article or book), it is usually hard to plagiarize within a real conversation without it being obvious to most participants. Likewise, when expectations are reasonable and conversations are interesting and feel valuable to students, there is very little motivation or reason to participate poorly. Plagiarism and other forms of bad behavior are obviously concerning when they happen, but in otherwise healthy communities they are not terribly common problems in Yellowdig. If you feel you are seeing enough “borrowing” that it feels like a systemic problem rather than a wayward student or two which can be addressed individually, here are a few recommendations:
1) Posts can be flagged by you and by students, which removes them from the community and reports them to the community owner and facilitators (i.e., you and your instructional team). At that point the post can either be put back into the community or left out permanently. This mechanism and your follow-up about those posts can help students understand what is acceptable and what is not within your community. Sometimes plagiarism is simply a student not understanding what they are doing or the implications of doing it. This allows for a learning experience.
2) Consider your implementation and how you are communicating the goals of the community to students. When students think their only goal is to complete an assignment or collect points they tend to procrastinate and try to get away with completing the assignment with the least work possible. That leads to quality problems and a higher likelihood students are going to try to “get away with” something. It’s important that you encourage students to be good citizens, help one another, and make sure there is strong dialogue so that members actually build strong social connections between members. It’s easy to want to try to pull one over on a professor, but if they know their peers are reading things and interacting a lot, they’ll be thoughtful about letting them down too.
3) Conversations really do require students to read what others have written and truly respond to others as a social partner. An over-emphasis on students posting and specifically requiring them all to post before talking to one another, often leads to poor content, repetitive seeming posts (or outright copying), and students feeling less social pressure to make unique and thoughtful contributions to the community. If students are copying or parroting others, often a solution is to encourage more commenting (i.e., conversation). You can remove any requirements to post (if you have any) and allow or encourage students to earn most of their points through commenting. Rewarding more points for comments will also focus them more on having real conversations.
4) Sometimes students doing things just to gather points is an indication that your point requirement is too high, you really are asking them to do too much
🔎 I need to know which students haven’t participated recently
In the left navigation menu for your community go to Data → Network Graph. You can see students in the “Graph” who are not connecting, hover their avatars to learn more, or you can go to the “Table” at the top of the Network Graph page and find a sortable table that shows the last connections of students to others in the community. If a student is not connecting with others, whether they are participating otherwise (i.e., posting) or not, it is typically concerning.
In Data → Reports there is a Point Report that will show you which students are not up to the current total needed. From there you can click “Show Log” to a see a full report of the 4 student’s recent participation.
📋 My Sharing, Listening, and Interacting scores are <50 (i.e., yellow or red)
Conversations really do require students to read what others have written and truly respond to others as a social partner. An over-emphasis on students posting and specifically requiring them all to post before talking to one another, often leads to poor content, repetitive seeming posts (or outright copying), and students feeling less social pressure to make unique and thoughtful contributions to the community. If students are copying or parroting others, often a solution is to encourage more commenting (i.e., conversation). You can remove any requirements to post (if you have any) and allow or encourage students to earn most of their points through commenting. Rewarding more points for comments will also focus them more on having real conversations.
📋 My Sharing score is good (>75) but my Listening and Interacting scores are low (<75)
It is usually pretty easy to get students to share more content just by making it so they have to collect more points or post more words to get to the point total. Unfortunately, producing a lot of content, even if it is good content, does not mean students will come back often to read it. And if they don’t come often to read the content and think about it, they are exceedingly unlikely to have deep, interesting, back-and-forth conversations. If you want students to discuss, you have to encourage them to do that. Usually this means increasing the points awarded for comments relative to posts. And making sure you have the social points on, which encourage students to post early, come back often, and post things that get good conversations started.
If content is not interesting or students are being told to talk about specific things they will often not read much more than they have to and will not show much curiosity. This often happens because of prompts that are restrictive of conversation or because all students are being told to post.
📋 My Sharing score is a bit low (50-75) even though my Listening and Interacting scores are pretty good (>75)
As long as you like what you are seeing otherwise, often this pattern is not actually that concerning to us. It means that students are listening to one another, clicking into the hyperlinks that are posted, and are interacting, but may not be creating as much new content or writing really long posts and comments. If you are not satisfied with the amount of new content being shared in posts, you can increase the total number of points that students need to reach the total goal or increase the number of points for posts. However, you’ll want to be careful doing that because it could lead to less robust conversation among students, which tends to reduce the amount that students learn, reduces course retention, and how often students visit your course community.
📋 My Interacting score is low (75) even though Sharing and Listening are high (>75)
Is your community large? If you are running a large community it is difficult to get some of the components of the Interacting score really high. For example, for a community of 500 students each student would need to post or comment 499 times to connect with every other student. If your Listening score is >75 and your community has more than 200 students, do not worry if your Interacting score is a tad low.
If your community is small and your Interacting score is lagging you may be doing too much in small groups or students may only be posting in their groups. Typically communities benefit from all students being able to see and experience everything being shared by the community. Segregating students into small groups too often or for too long will reduce community connectivity and degrade the experience.
After...
You had a great community for this term... now what?
To get ready for next term, you can utilize templates to copy settings (like your point configuration, topics, and accolades) from this community over to a new one.
Looking to get better outcomes? Want to review your community?
Stop by Yellowdig's Success Team Office hours. Free for ALL clients. Get timely advice and feedback from YD staff members who are former learning designers and professors.
When? Every Friday from 12-1 pm ET.
Strategies for Managing Large Communities in Yellowdig
Instructors Don’t Have to Read Every Post
Comparing a large Yellowdig community to a large lecture hall class, you may join the conversation in some group conversations but not all of them. This is the same in a large Yellowdig community. You can comment, reply, add content, share a resource, but do not feel you have to read and respond to everything.
Utilize @ mentions and #s
1. Encourage students to use hashtags, @mentions, and suggest specific topic tags that will organize content.
2. As an instructor or facilitator, the use of @community will notify students of important information.
Embrace Accolades
The use of accolades will encourage the behavior you would like to see in your large community. Facilitators may also award accolades.
Search is your friend 🔎
Find information that members have shared in your community easily with the Search, Filter, and Sort functions. For example, you can find participation based on keywords in a post or comment, topic tags associated with them, the dates of the participation, the person who participated, and much more.
Reports are critical for Large Class Management
Activity Feed
Get an overview of what activity came in since you last accessed the course.
Activity - Activity Feed