.png){kind=small}
*Updated March 8, 2021. Due to an overwhelming amount of interest in light of COVID-19’s impact on the education ecosystem, Yellowdig is extending the availability of our limited time offer for free access. The deadline to express interest in this offer has been extended to June 30,2021. Click here to learn more*
Are you feeling Zoomed out? Do you want more interaction opportunities with and between homebound students? Is tracking participation and efficiently giving feedback in Slack or Microsoft Teams a struggle? Do you wish you had more activities with real educational benefits that your students would enjoy?
Yellowdig’s proprietary platform uses community-building technology in tandem with a dynamic point system to get vibrant learning communities established in your courses and programs. By engaging students and automatically tracking their participation, less of your precious time is spent bean counting. By changing student behavior and rewarding meaningful participation, these communities become a valuable part of the course and program experience.
Instructors who use Yellowdig frequently talk about how their communities help them find joy in remote teaching. In our real learning communities, students participate in conversations about course content and get their questions answered collaboratively and quickly, without relying entirely on you and your instructional team. These experiences empower students to learn more through supportive environments that foster engagement.
To be clear, communities are not just for having fun with friends, though that is part of what makes them an effective educational tool. Social factors play an important role in the Community of Inquiry framework where Social Presence is defined as “the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop interpersonal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities.” Yellowdig is an education company; our pedagogy and platform were developed in cooperation with higher-education instructors. Working with over 60 institutions and over 2,000 instructors each semester, we know what really gets college students interacting and engaged, and we have the data to prove it.
With over one third of our company roster having taught college classes, a lot of us have been in your shoes. Tech products built for the masses are not made with you or your students’ needs in mind, are not FERPA compliant, and are not accessible for students with special needs. Learning might be a convenient side effect of using those other tools, but their team and technology were not created to make learning better — Yellowdig was.
We urge you to experience the benefits of a real community for you and your students. Uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak has left students isolated from their peers like never before and the need for social connection in course communities is critical.
Due to this unprecedented need, we want you to have Yellowdig at your disposal no matter what. To do our part in helping the academic community, we are making the following commitment to interested instructors: If you get started with Yellowdig before June 30th, we will extend an offer of free use through January 1, 2021 for up to 200 users per institution.
Or
If you want to learn more before you get started, we invite you to watch one of our product webinars to gain a further understanding of our product. Also, be sure to check out our website.
Shaunak Roy is founder and CEO of Yellowdig, a digital platform for active, perpetual learning allowing collaborative and immersive learning to happen. Write to: shaunak@yellowdig.com.