I thought this was a creative idea for discussion using what they are calling Digital PowerUps. It might be cool to try this in YellowDig using the #hashtag feature which gets little use.
Check out the Teaching in Higher Education Podcast for some evidence based information, a nice 5 minute recap of what this is and some specific examples.
Three general videos to share with YD faculty who can then share with students:
If students need to create superscripts in their posts, here is a video on how to do that.
Are you thinking you’d like to use YellowDig to replace your Blackboard discussions? Before you do, I would highly suggest watching the following videos and setting a time to meet with an Instructional Designer to discuss ideas.
Also, YellowDig is offering regular free webinars and they are excellent. If you cannot attend, they are all recorded and available afterwards.
Webinar (ASU): History, Efficacy and Instructional Design with Yellowdig (1 hour). Excellent! Shares some updated best practices.
Consider these two visuals of two different types of discussion – “discussion assignments” vs “Discussion Community”.
Image taken from YellowDig video on How to Build YellowDig Communities. Here you see the ‘go getter’ slowly turning into the procrastinator because most students procrastinate toward the deadline for the discussion assignment.
Image taken from YellowDig video on How to Build YellowDig Communities. Here you see a different type of interactive community where specific topic discussions can weave throughout the course and not end when each module ends. The go getter and the procrastinator are now all part of the discussion community.
Notes from a YellowDig webinar with faculty from Fort Hayes University.
Creating points creates a structure of the board and identifying value in specific types of activities.
There are two types of interventions instructors can make for a YellowDig board:
1) Board settings (ie points, weekly point max),
2) instructor interventions while course is in session – the number of posts instructors make, comments make and instructor badges.
Influence of points. YellowDig is based on a motivation system. It’s the power of the social engineering and gamification in this platform. When students realize that what they write gathers comments and others start engaging with their writing from others then the quality of their work goes up, their work is more engaging.
Relationship between student actions, board settings and instructor interventions.
What are minimum number of words set per post or comment? The default setting is not enough (40) and how do they get students to say more? And for comments, too?
Comment/post control is the value that the instructor places on comments. By default comment is worth half of points as a post. Some faculty are taking their “bad experiences’ from regular discussions when students didn’t comment well. Others used MORE points for comments to encourage conversation.
The interaction effect of structure settings had the largest conversation ratio (ie 4 comments per post): settings of all 3 comments (Encouraging comments (pin control), and upvotes and weekly max).
What is it that you want to accomplish on the YD board? See “formula” on YD webinar with Fort Hayes State University.
Instructor participation:
How to build a strong learning community in Yellowdig (for full details watch YD video)
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:
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