Teaching Public Health Topics Online

How to build a strong learning community in Yellowdig (for full details watch YD video)

• Time and participation
• Survival of strong and useful conversations
• Interconnected members
• Listening

Goal of YellowDig is a single assignment without weekly assignments with weekly deadlines. It is more of an open free form conversation. YellowDig suggest that the weekly assignments with deadlines each week have a damaging effect on building communities. Mostly because when you start the next week you are automatically killing off past discussions, especially if every student is expected to post. You also create an over- production of content and don’t produce any of the back and forth conversations.

How can we change our frame of reference from the ‘post every week’ format we are used to:

• You can take your assignments and turn them into prompts. If the free form discussion doesn’t work for all of your students, you can leave them with a prompt such as .. ‘if you cannot think of something to talk about this week, consider this..’.
• Faculty can be a dynamic part of the community by posting interesting and current articles that correspond to the content. This will help to engage students. Encourage students to post current event articles, too.
• Give students freedom and guide them along, as needed.