Fall Cohort Pilot Information Session

Natalie Ramos 0:16
All right, welcome, everyone. It is Tuesday, June 29. It's currently 10am. For me, and my partner, Kailie star. I think it's the afternoon 1pm. So we're going to go ahead and get started.

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Kailie Starr 0:33
Great. Yeah. Welcome everyone. Feel free to introduce yourself in the chat as you, you know, enter in here. And we'll get started here. And in about a minute or so.

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Natalie Ramos 0:49
We do have some team members signed in to answer any questions provide any resources in the chat. We also have access can see that but I'm going to go ahead and go through quickly our agenda. We're going to talk about Yellowdig just as a whole our mission, how it's scalable for different modalities, our values, we're going to talk about the new cohort pilot offering. And of course, the three easy steps to get started with us keys to successful pilot experience. And as well as look a little bit more in depth at our tools and resources that you'll have access to q&a will be right after and then an optional if you want to stick around for our platform demo.

Awesome.

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Kailie Starr 1:40
Cool. So thank you for that run down there, Natalie. I'm Kaylee. I'm a partnerships manager on the partnerships team. So I work closely with some of our partners to make sure that we are meeting their needs and optimizing some of their learning outcomes. So excited to to work closely with some of you as you join our pilot offering here.

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Natalie Ramos 2:05
I'm Natalie, I'm about four months into yellowdig. My background is actually in teaching secondary science in middle schools, I received a masters of education, but I actually found myself becoming more interested in the education technology. And so I kind of pivoted my classroom experience to education tech. And so here I am. And I work with our pilot onboarding. Um, okay, so getting started here, I think, you know, long before the global pandemic kind of forced us into zoom screens or online modalities. yellowdig was really created with the intention to bridge the gap between knowledge delivery and engagement. So one of the aspects that drove me personally to yellowdig is our mission to create communities where social interaction and learning build relationships that allow the relationships and the skills that allow people to thrive. So our engagement platform is for button ADA compliant. And we'll go through more aspects of why that is how that is.

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Kailie Starr 3:15
Great, so kind of just adding on to what Natalie just discussed, really, where we got our start was kind of looking at how we could build learning communities. So trying to replicate you know, what might happen in your in person classroom, right as best as we possibly can, in a variety of modalities. So yoga, it's actually been used in fully in person courses, hybrid, high flex, fully online, you know, kind of kind of all different modalities there, across different subject matters, different curriculum, that sort of thing. So really trying to meet you where you are, and, you know, enhance what's kind of already working well in your classroom, improving upon some of those, you know, connections that students can make, and some of that learning community aspect, in more of an online setting.

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Natalie Ramos 4:06
And we're gonna seek more to this as well. But we're, this is something that we wouldn't want to replace your instruction or your curriculum, rather yellowdig community kind of sits atop to a bridge both of those things within your own course. And so we're going to jump into kind of more about the values here. So if you're here, you've probably tried video class sessions, traditional discussion boards, through your LMS and found that they're really not enough to build authentic discussions and really see that social learning that's happening. We know that we we learn in a community of learners. So yellowdig is a student engagement platform designed to support active student driven communities where students can converse freely share knowledge, and really become intrinsically motivated to learn from one another. So we've designed our our platform with community in mind is one of our top values here. And also we have an eye for relevance for meeting students where they're at. Some students, as we know, might not have, you know, accessible or maybe even slow internet connections, others might have jobs or childcare responsibilities.



And yellowdig really helps make that synchronous learning, or asynchronous learning possible. And it's easy to use in a synchronous platform, it helps students learn at their own pace and share what matters most to them in on their own terms. And finally, at yellowdig, we, we drive and measure educational outcomes. So through our in platform data and our pilot dashboard, we actually provide all the feedback that you need to assess efficacy and tailor your teaching to the needs of your students. And we know that genuine communities produce genuine outcomes and recalibrating your community in response to data, you'll even better outcomes. And so you'll see all of these values, of course, come to live, come to life as we jump into the demo at the end here. But I'm going to I'm going to start explaining a little bit more about our free pilot offering in the fall. As always, we kind of feels like we might rush through this, but just drop any questions you have in the chat. We have Kvr members answering here. Okay, so our offering for the fall is really for any new instructor who doesn't already have a department utilizing yellowdig, you'll have the opportunity to use yellowdig at full capacity for free this fall. And this is an offering that's going to start July 1 through September first. And excuse the my slide is incorrect.



And it goes from July 1 till September 1. And this is really to ensure that you have plenty of time to take the required instructor certification course by a certain date. And so as we said before, yellowdig is as much technology as it is pedagogy. So taking this instructor certification course is vital to learning how your community can be successful with using a new tool. So during this time, you'll be able to speak with our team about any course goals, technical setup requirements, or talk through best practices, and learn how other instructors use yellowdig for various academic disciplines. And so if you have a course start date in August, or September, you must complete the ICC or instructor certification course by August 10. And if you haven't October or November start date, you must complete that ICC by September 15. That's why this offering is going to run from July 1 through September 1. Sorry about that incorrect part of the slide. And the pilot offering, you will still have access to all of the health data and the pilot dashboard that comes with yellowdig.



You'll have all features data applications that's accessible within your platform and a separate dashboard that shows you both live and historical data on the health and engagement of your community. Throughout your pilot experience, you'll have access to our team, ours and our yellowdig instructor support community, which is a global network of instructors where you can post questions and receive feedback from current yellowdig colleagues, as well as share experiences. Something new we're also doing I think, as a yellowdig community is you'll have an optional case study chance, chance to do a case study that will be featured on our website. So you'll have the opportunity to share both with every with every one and yellowdig on with either your department or university of how a yellowdig had performed for you.



And our fall cohort pilot is offering is really a way for everyone to I think lead the change and how online learning and engagement impacts are academic disciplines. Which is why we will ask you which academic discipline is going to be used for this pilot coming up and I think, you know, that's really because because yellowdig can be configured and utilized in such a variety of ways. You have the potential to create a community that drives change and has the data to support that. So we're really excited to to offer this customizable experience for you. I'm going to kind of give some wait time to just take a breath in a sip of coffee here and but any questions come in the chat. We have anything in the chat so far. Kailie.

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Kailie Starr 10:00
Nothing so far, no. Okay, yeah, so feel free to ask any questions as they come up. Otherwise, you're doing a great job explaining, so that's probably Great.

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Natalie Ramos 10:11
um, okay, I'm going to go through the quick three easy steps to, to get on boarded with our free trial here. And so the first one is to complete our registration form. This is really a way for us to create that customizable experience. for your upcoming course, it only takes about two minutes, assuming you know everything from your course start date, course end date, the type of course, and of course, what your outcomes are, that you'd want for a yellowdig. This QR code, you can go ahead and scan that'll take you to our free trial registration form.

Next, of course, I've talked about our instructor certification course, this is a really, it's actually been revamped in the last couple of months here. And it shows our pedagogy and technology of how to use yellowdig for setting up your community. If features walkthrough, videos, animated videos, our team has curated. And we tried to make it engaging, interactive. And of course to the point it takes a little over an hour to get through. You don't need to complete it all in one setting, I can guarantee that the time to invest now is actually going to save you more time down the road in terms of how to to use yellowdig.



And I know you know, as I said before, this is one of those things where you know you invest the time in to set up as a previous instructor, I was interested in how the tech could supplement what already works. So yellowdig really has created this tool with you in mind. And of course, throughout this course, you will have access to a yellowdig instructor support community, this must be completed to access our pilot. And yeah, I think there's so much more I can say about this course you'll have resources embedded throughout, you'll have videos, you'll always have access to through our YouTube channel. And it'll be one of the very important steps to complete before having access to the pilot. And then that's pretty much it, you have your opportunity to set up your community with client success ports, I can be on that call as well. And, or I will be on that call as well. You have an option optional integration with LMS. So you can be able to connect this to your canvas, Moodle, D two l whatever you have available or not, it still works with our platform, it takes about 15 minutes with resources, or you can book a meeting with us. I really enjoy these kinds of sets setting up because it is really that way for us to kind of create a vision of how you'd like to engage students in your community and for your course. Yeah, it's really as simple as that.



I'm going to jump into another slide here, and talking more about a keys to a successful yellowdig experience. Again, if you have any questions, you can put them in the chat. And so this is really important to kind of go through kind of like before we jump into what the platform looks like. One thing I love about yellowdig is you'll see the interface resembles a social media platform, but it functions like a discussion board. It's actually none of these things. yellowdig is designed to motivate students to initiate those important conversations and share their learning between their colleagues. So this means that a typical weekly prompt based discussion becomes more just irrelevant to starting a conversation. So instead, what you'll see in yellow to community is students, whether it's the procrastinator or the go getter. These are the ones who are really dispersed throughout week by week carrying conversations between weeks as they relate to your course or current events. This doesn't mean that you as the instructor can't pose questions for your students or think readings resources, but you're now no longer the sage on the stage, initiating weekly conversations. But you're more of the guide on the side acting with students to learn and commenting on posts throughout the week. And so of course, the first key to a successful yellowdig experience is to really have a growth mindset and rethinking discussion pedagogy as we probably have seen it.



Yes, it's a new tool to invest time and learning on but we've seen that the more time you invest through the ICC and with our team, the better outcomes that you will have and of course, our second one is embedded within the platform of the gainful learning principles. This part, it's really easier to show you but it really speaks to the behavior reward system that is within the platform that incentivizes students for making posts and commenting, receiving reactions and receiving accolades. And this helps students increase quality of their posts and engagement. And the third is utilizing our LMS grade passback system. Although integration is not required, it is nice, I will say to have a platform that can automatically create student participation and pass it back as a percentage to your gradebook. Number four, leveraging the tools, there's a lot of data that can be produced within this. And we'd love to work with you to see what what you could use to support your outcomes as an instructor and also for your students will show more of that in the demo.



Lastly, is to partner with your department or institution. I think you know, what I love most about yellowdig is we value the unique instructor stories that come from using our social engagement platform. And so if there's particular key points of interest or goals that your departments focused on, we are We would love to, to partner with you. Just ask We are here to help you and your students. And so I'm going to have Kimmy jump into a little bit more about what these tools and resources are,

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Kailie Starr 16:35
That we'd love to help you with. Great, thanks, Natalie. And as you've hopefully, hopefully picked up by now, we are very data driven. And so we've built Oops, sorry, I think I accidentally muted. So we're very data driven, if you mess up, yes. And so we've built some pieces into the platform to help you actually analyze this data, measure the health of your community. So what you're seeing on the left hand side, here is our health dashboard, we look at a couple different metrics and measure how healthy your community is measuring those engagements. And then on the right, there is actually a network graph. So you can see those little dots that are actually representative of students. So showing how well connected students are you able to actually identify those at risk students that are maybe those outlier students not super engaged. And you can obviously identify those students that are very engaged. So these are just a couple of the visualizations and dashboards that we have built out into the platform here, again, to best support you and make sure that we're really, you know, reaching those those learning outcomes that you're hoping for whether that's improving student engagement, course, persistence, you know, whatever those might be, we've made these readily available for you. I think we're gonna take a minute, pause to see if there's any questions. Otherwise, I can pull up the platform, Natalie, and start walking through a little demo here.

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Natalie Ramos 18:12
Great, as she's setting that up, I'm going to stop share here. We'll dig into the demo. Thank you. Yeah. Cool.

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Kailie Starr 18:24
So just to show you what an integration might look like, I do have the demo built out into a canvas. course here. So again, we do integrate with most learning management systems, but just wanted to kind of share with you what this you know, process might look like. So you would hop into your learning management system, jump into your course, here we have a intro to business course you'll see. And yellow dig is usually set up either as a side link here, a link in the assignments, wherever is most convenient for you. But with our integration, it is one click access, so launches you right into your downloaded community. So that is now what you are seeing here, you should start to see some elements of social media, whether that's the hashtags or emoji reactions, there is a single scrolling feed. So we really tried to make it as user friendly as possible. Some of the great things that happen in yellowdig is students asking questions and being able to, you know, receive help from their peers, maybe sharing, you know, relevant articles and, you know, videos, things like that, that that might be relevant to what they're learning in their course. So really trying to, you know, initiate some of those authentic conversations there. So as far as some of the functionality, this big blue button over here is how you would create a post.



Try to make it as easy as possible. You would title your post, so maybe you would say welcome You would say my name is Professor star. You can see here as I'm typing, this bar is filling up. So if you set a word minimum on your post, once I reached that word minimum, this would turn green and kind of signaled to me that paid this is good to go, I'll earn my points for that. And you can see some of the multimedia functionality here. You can add files, videos, images, they all embed really nicely in the platform, if you add them there. The poll feature is a really popular feature. So maybe you want to use this as an icebreaker in the beginning of your course, maybe ask everyone what their favorite ice cream flavor is, or something. Or maybe you want to test students knowledge on a particular subject before you lecture on it. That's a good way to, to kind of test their knowledge, you have the ability to make your post anonymous.



So this is really nice for if maybe you are teaching a more technical course, and maybe a student has a question and they're embarrassed to ask that question, they could actually make an anonymous, so they're still able to get the help. Without maybe sacrificing some embarrassment there. This can be turned off to if you don't want students being anonymous, that that is a possibility as well. Also, for some of your technical courses, we have some great formula functionality here. So we have a lot of tech editor. So you, we have a virtual keyboard here to help you out with that. So you can actually add, you know, different functionality live into the platform here, which is really nice. You can also copy and paste, you know, some functions here to Kailie.

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Natalie Ramos 21:42
we have someone who would actually like to see I think, john Clark Kent, love it. When asking to demo the poll feature. Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. So you go here, so maybe I would say, Please choose what you're most excited about. For this class.

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Kailie Starr 22:09
So my options would be this is a business course. So let's see. Marketing. you're most excited for finance. And then I would typically want to show the results after they vote, so they're not swayed. And I'm gonna make my polling unlimited. So they can, you know, answer as for as long as they want. I need a topic here. Let's do introductions. So then you can see here now, when a student or someone else in the course sees this, they're able to actually click their option there and vote. Once they vote, they'll be able to see, you know, the percentage of people who have voted for that particular option. Good question, though. Any other questions, Natalie?

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Natalie Ramos 23:15
Nope, that was just a quick request. Yeah, you do an excellent I love this feature, too, because it kind of stirs the direction of what you want to talk about next within your course and see what everyone else's interests are.

of that. Yeah.

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Kailie Starr 23:31
Great. Um, so something that I just had to add here was actually topics. So that's something that's unique to yellowdig. So when you're creating a post, you do associate a topic with it. So this is something that the instructor actually creates, we typically recommend that they are associated with kind of your overarching themes of the course. This helps organize the community. So if I scroll down here to this post, without even reading it just right off the bat, I see this post is about accounting. And the student has a question, right? So this kind of catches my eye. I know right away what this post is going to be generally about, you can filter by these topics. So maybe, as an instructor, I want to filter by questions to see what questions my students have. But maybe as a student, I am particularly struggling with accounting. And so maybe I'm going to filter by this topic. See what people are talking about, try to, you know, learn more about this topic through the conversations that my peers are having on yellow dig. So that's one way that these are super helpful. Another way is it helps actually guide the conversation. So maybe I'm a student, maybe I'm struggling with what to talk about this week.



Or maybe I'm bringing in an article and I want to make sure that it's relevant to what we're talking about in class. Looking back at these topics, it's helpful to know Okay, where does this fit in? Is this kind of relevant to share right now? That sort of thing which is really helpful. Cool. Any other questions in the chat, Natalie? Nope, you're looking good so far. Okay. Cool. So I'll hop over to our point system. So you can see here, just a general kind of highlight of how are the points I've earned and my goal. But as far as earning points in yellowdig, this is something that's also unique. So I have my participation points, which you can see here, I get points for creating a post and commenting on a post, just like you would in most traditional discussion forums, or your learning management system discussion board. So that's pretty standard here, What's really unique about yellowdig is what we call our social points. So you now get points when someone comments on your post, and when someone reacts with an emoji to your post.



So this does a couple of things. And this is really kind of the key and changing that student behavior, and incentivizes students to post earlier in the week, so a common, you know, issue or challenge with discussion boards is students waiting until 1159, Sunday night to post I'm sure you're all familiar with that. So our point system actually takes that into consideration and tries to, you know, go head on with that, that challenge. So if I post in my community, I am going to be incentivized with this point system to actually post earlier in the week, to give my peers, you know, greater chance to see my post and interact with it. So I have a better chance of earning some of these additional social points here. It also acts as sort of a quality or qualitative buffer. So it's obviously not a perfect qualitative assessment. But something that's really nice is if I post something that's you know, great quality, super engaging, starts a good conversation, my peers are going to engage with that post, and therefore, I'm going to be rewarded for that with the point system.



On the other hand, if I post something that's maybe not super relevant, or not the best quality appears know that if they engage with my post, I will receive extra points, and therefore, they're probably less likely to engage with my post, and therefore I'm gonna have to work a little bit harder to get my points that week. So it definitely incentivizes me to post better content post earlier in the week, post something that I think is going to start a conversation. So that's really kind of the secret sauce here. Is this point system here? Do we have any questions on the point system so far? Natalie? No, it's

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Natalie Ramos 27:29
it's looking pretty clear in the chat.

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Kailie Starr 27:33
Great, um, I want to be conscious of time. I know we have about three more minutes. So if anyone has any questions about the platform at all, please let us know. I think the only other thing that I would want to show us some of the data, I know we highlighted that in the slides. But it's kind of nice just to see it live as well. So you can see here, this is actually the network graph here. So you can see these students are, you know, pretty well connected, you can see those outgoing and incoming connections here with the arrows.

And then you can also see some of our outlier students. This is a demo community. So obviously not the best representation of data here. But hopefully, you get a sense for what this might look like in a real community. There's actually a really strong correlation between participation in yellowdig, and overall core success. And so some of these outlier students here, this visualization is actually a good indicator that they might fail or withdraw from the class. And so some of our partners have you used this network graph as sort of a preventative measure to actually reach out to these students see how they're doing, see if maybe they're struggling with the course or something personal is going on. And actually, you know, helps them better connect with their with their students, which is really nice. Cool, I know, we have two minutes left. So Natalie, any anything else that we wanted to share with the group?

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Natalie Ramos 29:04
There is really so much that can be configurable and customized and data that can be seen here. I think it you know, it really is probably best set up a meeting or time with one of us to to understand how this could work well for your course, but I don't see anything in the chat or the q&a. Great. ICC, of course, is going to go through everything in a lot more depth.

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Kailie Starr 29:38
So be sure to take that as well, as well if you're interested. Yeah. Great. Um, did we share the link for that? Actually?

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Natalie Ramos 29:45
Let me see. I know I have something for registration form with the QR code and might still have it copied in my clipboard here.



Kailie Starr 29:54
Okay. And yeah, I think that'd be helpful to share just in case Couldn't get the QR code going.

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Natalie Ramos 30:02
Let me go ahead and put this in the chat. This is the link to our registration form. Great. Thank you, Natalie. All right, everyone.



Kailie Starr 30:19
Well, if there aren't any other questions, we'll give you a minute back of your day. But thanks so much for joining us today. Hopefully this was helpful and taught you about our pilot program and and the platform in general. Again, if you have any other questions, I'll go ahead and drop my email in the chat as well so you can feel free to reach out. Otherwise, the registration form is probably the best way to get started there with with our pilot. Great. Alright everyone have a great rest of your day. Thank you.