 Hello, everyone, and welcome to our Next.Learn session doing more with less yellow dig. Now, this is a great tool. I've been using this in a number of my classes that I support with faculty, and I have had nothing but rave reviews about this tool. And so I'm so excited that we have several faculty members here with us today who are going to be sharing their experiences with the tool. And we have a discussion from one of the yellow dig reps that planned for later on during the session today and hopefully I believe we're set up for a brief demo as well too, correct? Excellent. All right, so let's go ahead and dive right in. So for those of you who may not be aware, the Dutton Learn series is an event that is held by the Dutton E Education Institute. And if you would like to stay informed about different events that we have coming up, you can stay connected with us through our Teams channel. And right here you can see we have the information on how you can go ahead and stay connected. That Teams channel, if you just go ahead and click on that tiny URL, it should take you right in and you should be able to access that without any issues. But of course, if you run into any issues, please let me know and we will make sure that we get connected with you. In addition, we also have this What Do You Want to Learn About URL that is there. Now this, if you click on that link, it will take you to a survey in which you can provide feedback to us in terms of what types of information would be helpful for you to have us discuss in these Dutton Learn sessions. If it's something that you have found an amazing solution to a challenge that you've been facing and you would love to share that out with the broader EMS community, we'd love to have you as a guest speaker. Or if you simply have a challenge and you're not quite sure what to do about it, you can go ahead and post this. It's anonymous. And then we will dig into our expertise and help provide a solution through the Dutton Learn series. Okay, so let's go ahead and move on to today's agenda. And I'm not sure why this is giving me so many problems with advancing. Okay, so today's agenda, we have our guest speakers from Penn State University. Then we'll move into a panel discussion. In the final discussion with our guest speakers, we will have Jeanine Galligan from Yellow Dig, who's our Yellow Dig rep. We'll have a conversation with her and she'll give us a brief demo of Yellow Dig and then we'll move into a Q&A session. So today's guest speakers are Hailey Sankey. She is an assistant teaching professor in energy and sustainability. Hailey is an associate teaching professor and an advisor for the online Bachelor of Arts in energy sustainability policy, instructing EGEE 495 internship experience, EGEE 299 foreign studies, and EMSC 302 orientation to energy and sustainability policy. She's worked as a licensing coordinator assisting hydraulic utilities navigate the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's cooperative licensing agreement process. She helped foster stakeholder involvement, a critical component for successful license submission, and approval as well as supported habitat and water quality study efforts. She also served as the Southern Allegheny's regional energy coordinator, completing energy audits and educating municipalities on energy reduction and savings opportunities. And we also have joining us today, Eric Schenke, who's an assistant teaching professor in renewable energy and sustainability systems and sustainability management and policy. Eric has been researching energy and teaching sustainability related issues for the past 20 years, his background in environmental policy, ethics of complex systems, sustainability strategy, ecological indicators, multi-scale power analysis with a geopolitical focus on China. He's also a co-lead of the Renewable Energy and Sustainability Systems, or the REST program, and oversees the sustainability management and policy track and certificate, and has been working with the program since it launched in 2013. Hailey and Eric, thank you so much for joining us today. Glad to be here. Great. Yeah, thanks. Now we have structured today's session as a panel discussion with our two guest speakers. And so we're going to go ahead and answer the questions that I have posted up here on the screen. So, Hailey, we'll start with you. And then Eric, if you want to go ahead and give a follow up to that, or if either one of you want to jump in if you feel passionate about answering a question right away, feel free. But our first question is what course or course does have you implemented yellow dig in? And can you tell us a little bit about it? So I ended up teaching a course for one of our adjuncts last semester. And I've taught it for him before. EMSC 240N, it's contemporary sustainability and contemporary culture class. And it was written by our adjunct professor, and it's a great class, students love it. But it was pretty, when I came on board, I realized how cumbersome it was for the instructor to deliver it the way he had it set up. So Megan really helped me streamline that a bit more with the introduction of yellow dig. I use it in all my classes except capstone now. So I have I've eventually I started using it. I think when I redesigned one of my courses where I really wanted a graduate seminar kind of experience where students were able to really have more enriched discussions and that was applied energy policy, which is a these are all grad courses. So I was after that graduate seminar kind of feel and after teaching it just for one semester I felt it was so successful that I was redoing another course which was non-market strategies course for renewables. And so I decided to implement it then. And now this semester, one of my courses that you know I've been remaking as well the the bioethics course on ethics of rest kind of systems. That one was probably a little bit harder because I wasn't fully remaking the course I was really just implementing yellow dig. I was replacing the conversation component. So that was a little bit different and the other two courses I was sort of remaking rebuilding from scratch. And so yeah I decided to do that the only one I don't use it for is the capstone course because that's not really a discussion sort of forum based course I really use there I use slack and I haven't really found a you know I mean I guess I could use teams to it's sort of the same thing but but for actual discussions and for full class discussions I anytime I'm doing that I'm you know fully rolling out yellow dig at this point so I yeah. Excellent thank you. So our next question is what was the student experience like before using yellow dig. In most of the classes that I've worked with it's the traditional canvas discussion forum posts and then usually there's a commenting requirement. Those usually yield. Not great quality and also low participation and very low sustained participation. I find a lot of students are hanging out there the day the comments are due and then just waiting for someone to also comment on just to fulfill that requirement it all happens. Hours before the deadline and it's really kind of disappointing it doesn't matter how much you encourage them to do it throughout the week. Without actual deadlines throughout the week students just don't do it they don't log on until they have to. The posts and the discussion forums tend to be lackluster and students just overall don't really care for them they don't really see a benefit to those kind of discussion forums and canvas has been my the feedback that I've received. So yeah it was just kind of a meh experience for students before yellow dig came along in my opinion. You know because you do want to use groups sometimes to just at least constrain the conversations and when you implement groups in canvas they completely isolate the conversations and they silo them just for that group so the group can't see what the other groups are talking about. And you know I used groups to mainly keep discussions manageable. In that sense in terms of the canvas side of things but it really made it difficult to grade and then crosstalk and then there was even less participation because students weren't seeing what other students and other groups were. And we're doing as well so I found you know it just it ended up being just another writing assignment. And not really a conversation you know for the reasons that Haley identified as well the last minute posting and you know there was no way in canvas to set up this need to like post first and then post again and so into have like double deadlines and yellow dig really sort of took care of all of that. If you're some clever stuff with groups I have to say but not using yellow dig groups per se but it's a long story but I could show you how to do it actually easy. Well we actually have that question planned later is sort of telling us more about your favorite elements so that would be a great opportunity to talk about the groups component of yellow dig Eric thank you. What opportunities or challenges did you observe when using yellow dig or sorry not challenges what opportunities or changes did you observe when using yellow dig. I would say the biggest two changes I saw were not only the increased participation and engagement with the students but the variety of subjects that they broached. There were some weeks where I had guided discussion prompts and then there were some weeks where it was free discussion. And the weeks where they were left to their own devices. There was really some interesting things that students pulled in that I wouldn't have necessarily connected the dots with sustainability so I really enjoyed seeing how they utilize the freedom in that way to introduce some tangential kind of subjects. For me it was like the capacity to use both teams and then have everybody in all the other teams see what other teams were posting. And not having because usually the problem too is when you have teams it's unless you put somebody up to bat every time to lead the discussion most people are waiting or you know not or it's always the same person kind of leading the conversation. And here I see more other kinds of students actually taking lead on the conversations and then you know some of the more active ones actually sitting back a little bit and responding. And I think that there's more room for that and responding to other threads as well from other groups so you know I think it was really nice way to cross thread a lot you know cross thread what the groups were talking about because it was all under the same topic but then I asked them each like I only have three groups before I would divide the groups into like four students here I divide them into 10 students so it's it gives them a lot of room. I think to be able to have a really robust conversation. Excellent thank you. Okay what was the experience like for you in teaching the course before yellow dig. So, I'm not going to lie what I say I hated creating discussion forum posts. It, especially when there was like a secondary commenting, because if you set the commenting up and canvas is a separate grade, then you had to notify the students of that because they would freak out if they commented and then the grade book wasn't showing that is fulfilled. So it was just kind of burdensome cumbersome, in order to implement that in a way that the students understood what was going on and that you could track down who did what for the commenting assignments and if you get more than, you know, 20 25 people in a class it's really kind of a pain to sift and through the posts and figure out who commented and who didn't. I also really had a hard time grading discussion forum posts and their associated comments because you know some comments could be one or two sentences and really quality. And then you could get some people who wrote a diatribe, and it was still really good quality but it was a lot more effort right so how do you capture that and grade it appropriately. So I really struggled with the grading part of it to be equitable. Yeah, I mean, it was really tedious to grade in canvas and I always, I still haven't understood what went wrong sometimes I could see like what one student would post and other times I would go to grade it and I'd see everybody's posts or. I mean it just I still never figured out exactly how to get it to work the same way, reliably every time, and just in terms of trying to grade canvas discussions. And there was no real way to have general conversations like across if you're using groups in a way that, you know, say somebody had post a question, and you know you want to respond to everybody. It's like, just, it was a mess, in that sense and, you know, I think canvas just really to me it was nothing different than the kind of conversation thread forums we used to have with Angel it was just a slightly different visual format but, you know, nothing more sophisticated than that really. Yes, so just a little bit of context for those who are watching the recording of this session and for those who are currently attending. One of the strengths of yellow dig is actually the fact that it's it has automated grading, and it makes the workload for the faculty members, much, much easier, but it also allows them the flexibility to go in and actually award accolades or additional points. And so the grading scale for students in terms of how they go about earning points is all very clearly conveyed to students so they can go in and they can say exactly oh I get 260 points if I make a point, if I make a post that meets this criteria. Oh and I get additional points if I go in and I make a post. And so that really helps shift that grading dynamic so that students are not waiting until right before the deadline to make those posts because they know that they can get their, their points as soon as they make that submission. So it really is, I think probably one of my favorite features of the system because it just significantly reduces the workload for the faculty members but at the same time. And interestingly enough, it also seems to increase student satisfaction. Would you say that that's true for your experiences. Yeah, I think I'm getting. I think the real time understanding of where their score is is very satisfying to them, and that they can just keep pushing it up until you know responding and doing it until they're happy with their grade. There's no way to keep track of that as somebody who's, you know, grading these things after the assignments are due. So I think it really helps them push up the participation because they know exactly where they stand with their grade. Yeah, definitely. I originally heard about yellow dig from a grad student who was using it, I believe in your class Eric and she expressed to the other students in the sustainability club meeting about how much she loved it because her it was like a game. It was like you game to the system or not the game the system but gained the points so like she she loved the challenge of hitting that ceiling of points every week. And so that really piqued my interest because at the time when she told me about it which was a couple years ago now. You know, everybody was talking about how do we gamify everything and so I think students really like the challenge and I think they also like the agency that they have with that right so they have they have direct control over the points that they're awarding and it's definitely objective. It's not based on whether I feel they did well or not it's based on a program that's awarding points and they know what those points are and how many points they can get and so I think it's, I think that's what they really love about it is just that it's kind of independent. Yeah, in real time. Definitely students like to get that that grade right away and I think that there's actually quite a bit of research that reinforces that the sooner that students receive grades on something the more meaningful it is for them and the more impactful up to their learning experience. So, excellent. What was the quick, quick comment. Is this an open discussion. I'm sorry. I've been in meetings all morning I'm all spend around so I really. Thanks for inviting me. Yeah, actually, Dan really quickly. Do you want to go ahead and give yourself an introduction for folks who may not know who you are. So my name is Dan faster. I've been teaching as an adjunct for ESP since 2015 I think. So, I have taught sustainability couples the sustainability focus classes and then some energy energy policy I started teaching recently so and I've been using a yellow dig user for two years now, I guess, whatever it was. But, I like yellow dig for all the reasons you stated I think that is all I look at Lee stated but the one thing that I think that is missing out in my opinion, but what they're graded on is not content per se. So, I think my experience has been that they do actually stick to like, you know, if you give them some some guidelines to what they should discuss like they're pretty robust, legitimate discusses like they're not gaming the system which I thought they would do, but they really don't. It's just that they you don't have as much control over the content that they post which is good because they have control. But if they're not really focusing on what you're trying you want them to focus on that's my only comment about what I did like about the discussion boards you have guided questions you can grade and based on those questions and not necessarily whatever questions they want to answer. I would say it's better. I never had issues with creating discussion boards it was kind of a complicated arrangement but you can do it. But that's the only thing I don't like about yellow dig really is that you don't have it's hard to guide everyone into answering the questions you want them to answer if there are some specific things you want them to answer. That's my only thing. So I'm sorry if I burst in I don't know is this an open discussion. I only saw three people talking I didn't know if everyone was contributing show. I'm sorry. No, it's you're a faculty member and we evaluate or yeah we evaluate we value your contributions. Can you evaluate that to that too. So thanks for joining the conversation. Thanks for letting me know. Sure. And so what was your experience like after you implemented yellow dig. We'll put this back to Haley. So I really enjoyed watching the discussions happen. I run that largely hands off because I really feel like students have a different level of conversation when they know we're creeping and when we're not. So I did monitor it but I didn't interject at all. Unless someone said hey there's an issue, or if I saw something weird going on. But otherwise I just stayed out of the conversation and let it happen organically on. Much like I feel like happens in the physical classroom right like when you get students together to talk you can't possibly be standing over every student or every group all the time so. I tried to take that kind of approach where it was present but not. I don't want to say overbearing but not like a shadow on the conversations right so that was just my approach and it made my life so much easier that way. And I I mean I was just impressed with the level that the students brought when they could like Dan said they could gain the system but they didn't they said they didn't and they got they really seem to enjoy each other's. And I truly believe knowing what I know about our students that it encourages connections post each class as well so like the next time they see each other in a class it's not going to be like oh I recognize the name it's going to be like oh yeah we talked about this in our last class. I would agree with that yeah I think I'm seeing now it's sort of because I teach the capstone course which is them at the end and and I feel like they've had more robust conversations in class because of this so they're more familiar with each other. You know by time they get into their capstone groups at the end of their time in the program. So I'm starting to see that actually have an effect ripple effect. You know so it's been a couple years now and they've gone through a couple of courses that have yellow dig in it and and I think it really does make for better connections. You know throughout throughout their time and better one on one connections or interpersonal connections so in ways that just I didn't notice before and until now. I think also the experience after was after first implementing it was OK how do I do this for other courses but having you know realizing you need to have a really good strategy you can't just you know like I think I felt like with canvas I could just sort of implement it on the fly almost but here you really need to figure out a good strategy on how to how you want to approach it for the semester. And like Dan had mentioned can be difficult but I've also found some ways where you can embed the yellow dig in a kind of question framework where you have the questions on top that's sort of in canvas and then you have the yellow dig interface. Sort of in that so they realized exactly the kind of questions they should be talking about and then I use topics and I'll assign different groups different topics. Topic tags is one of the ways you can search through you know these various posts. So you know I have them combine the proper topic tags and that's how I get them to sort of identify within their groups and within the what they should be talking about in that sense. So so there's some strategies to address that I think but you know you should have one. Once you really get familiar with the system so and try to stick with it for the semester and not like just too many things on the fly. But yeah. Great. Okay, what are specific features of the yellow dig tool that you found especially helpful or possibly even transformational for your teaching or student experience. So I always found it hard to implement extra credit in the canvas format and so the weeks where there wasn't a formal assignment for a yellow dig posts and students chose to do that. That was a great way for them to earn extra credit and didn't add to my workload to do that right so it was a way for them to boost their grade. Without causing extra work for me which is always two thumbs up right. And I also love that I could go in and manipulate the posts so or manipulate the points after the fact. For example I had this one student that did a three parts posts that was really interesting and they put a lot of time and energy and effort into it. And because it was like fall break week or something there wasn't a lot of engagement from the other students and so I was able to go in and bump their grade for that week because of the energy and effort that they put into that that I felt it was worth acknowledging and rewarding the student for that effort. I feel like what was really transformational is that students were getting feeling like they were getting feedback, either from me or from other students in a way that wasn't totally reliant on me providing grades. Right so I feel like students felt more engaged and felt like they were getting feedback. One of the things I like about it is you can pin one of your responses so if somebody has a question that you want everybody to read, you pin that response like you would in Twitter or something like that to the top so that like, you know everybody every time somebody comes in. That's the first thing they're going to see. So, you know, hopefully they'll read through those responses first, knowing that it's pinned, and then you take that down after about a week or so and thinking, you know, so especially if it's a question about how to work something with yellow dig. I think that was really helpful. I loved searching with tie love using topics. You know, you have to develop topics like students can't develop their own topic tags you have to develop them so you. You're able to use those but you know you click on group one, for example, you can see everything somebody that used a group one tag posted. You know, say one article that they should have been responding to like I have a topic tag for that. So you can see all the assignments that had to do with that. The one thing I wish it had was, I wish it had the ability to like go like this like everything is very drilled down I wish I could like open up sort of like an accordion and see some of the conversations or the discussions in terms of the conversations, as opposed to having to drill down every time I mean, just scroll straight down I wish there was a way to, I guess like, open it up like that a little bit at least from the, the like the instructors perspective I don't know if that would help with students perspectives, but but sometimes because it would be fun to be able to see which conversations are maybe, you know, threads are more robust than others. In that sense. So, yeah, maybe a card view or even like a concept map view that would be really cool. Yeah, yeah, I mean I think of other tools that have implemented that sort of thing in the past and, you know, sort of lifting some of those ideas or a way to just, you know, see the see the network analysis of the, you know, the kind of network view of the discussions in that sense and you could do that probably using tags or something along those lines so I would have helped grading I don't know but I think it would help me see the conversations as they're progressing. Because sometimes people you know, even though I pushed the conversation on the topics on they'll come back to certain threads and stuff like that so just having that kind of tool but I you know, I think the other tools are great I still wish I still had one by we like the ability to have a by week in there in the calendar scheduling, I wish that functionality was there at this point. But other than that because when you set it up at the beginning of the semester, you set it up for the duration of the semester but you can't turn off a week for earning like if it was spring break or Thanksgiving break so a lot of times you'll have to go back in and either adjust or just give them those full points for that week. Or, you know, I mean, I don't expect them, you know, on Thanksgiving or spring break to, you know, be engaged so I don't want to require but you can go back in and just give them the points for that. That's the one thing I wish could get worked out. At least at this point. But yeah, and I think it's it's helped in a sense, I haven't really tried to look at my SRTE. I hate that I find the whole thing extremely problematic as a way of grading and assessing the instructor but but yeah I haven't really looked at the SRTs closely enough to see what the impacts are but but I'm sure if I did there would be some really great comments on there about how how they enjoyed the conversation. Yeah, Eric you actually implemented a survey question of your own just sort of free form within yellow dig I think it was after the first semester, you implemented this and you got some really interesting responses. Do you want to share a little bit about that. I'd have to go back and look right now but I do I mean they were all positive. I don't think anybody had anything really negative to say about the experience I, I know that a lot of them for a lot of them it was. I think it was more transformational for the students honestly. Yeah, I mean it was very much for me but compared to say previous experiences and you know we've we've tried a lot of different tools like to engage, get better engagement with discussions like piazza and some of these others and, you know, Megan is the expert on the latest thing and whatever it is for for for this kind of format and so that's why she got me into trying yellow dig and and yeah I think it's, I think it has been really great from from the student side of things. I'll have to dig up some of those I can share some of those and certainly if we do the panel discussion and or TLT conference would be more than happy to dig some of those up. But yeah for the most part I felt like the student response was was both robust and positive. Excellent yeah so I actually remember one of the posts that one of the students had made. And I remember it because it's stuck with me. So they had participated in your course and I think it was one of the upper level courses in the program and I remember their statement it was something along the lines of this was the most engaged I have ever felt in this program. Because of the use of yellow dig so I think that there's something that from the student perspective is the it's not just the functionality of the system like the the auto grading and they know exactly where they stand with their points but like Hailey was saying there is that student agency there is that autonomy in which students have to feel like they're not just responding to a question for the sake of responding to a question because they have to in order to get the grade, but that they can share their thoughts they can share their opinions they can share things that impassion them about this field and I think that yellow dig does a phenomenal job of allowing students to have that voice. Within the class which is something that we don't actually see with a lot of other systems or a lot of other discussion forums like in canvas. So I think it like you said Eric it really is very transformational on the the end of the students. All right. So the last question that I have here is what advice would you have for someone who is curious about this tool. I'll start here real quick have a plan and and understand how you're going to use topic tags and try not to use more than three I think would be my suggestion otherwise they just, they don't remember to get them all. But yeah, I think I think really just having a understand how the system works have a plan for, you know, the guided questions, and then just provide some guardrails there and then also leave it like one of the things I always do of course and I know that this is kind of common, but you know just like a current events breaking news kind of topic tag where they can just post something that they find completely relevant to the course. And one thing I'm actually doing right now this semester with the discussion forums is I'm having them help me update the modules because I have case studies in the ethics course, having them help me update those with the materials on yellow dig they're posting all the stuff that they've been finding that'll help me update the actual case study itself so I'm using the platform to help. The students help me do the work that I don't have the bandwidth to do because I'm actually teaching the course at the time and I just can't. We just don't have the ability to take it offline because we need to be offering this, you know, so many times a year. Sorry. Yeah. That my only advice is obviously well, a couple things I guess talk to Megan or someone who's familiar with it and get an understanding of how it can help you and how can be applicable in your class. It might not be a one size fits all things so maybe it's not. Not such a great idea to put it in your class but I really enjoyed working with it. I taught that class that semester there was a situation in there where the prior the instructor had it set up so that they would have to go in and manually grade how many comments were made or if there was a second comment made. I would highly advise against trying to go in there and manually grade anything just because it is a little tough like Eric said to make sure you're not missing anything, especially if they're super active like they were the semester I taught the class. There's just a lot in there and so trying to find what you need to make sure everyone gets the credit that they deserve is hard to do so. Don't kind of halfway it I guess would be my advice like either go all in and let yellow dig do the grading or you know I wouldn't wouldn't use the tool. Excellent. Thank you so much. All right. Next up, we have Jeanine Galligan, who is the senior success manager at yellow dig. And Jeanine is always looking for ways to collaborate with others to achieve goals whether that is at home at the office in the classroom or in the community. Through her experiences she has served as a collaborator instructor mentor and project manager to help students and colleagues achieve their goals. She's had the opportunity to work with people from all different backgrounds cultures and ability raging, ranging in ages five to 75. And she has experienced working in nonprofit private and educational institutions as an educator project manager and course designer, what consistently learning new technologies. She's worked with ed tech and SAS applications throughout her career and has integrated technology as a way to engage and support others. Welcome Jeanine. Thank you. I appreciate that and I appreciate hearing all of these stories. It's fantastic. I did use yellow dig myself so when you were asking those questions Megan I was thinking what would I answer what would I say. And I really appreciated a you all taking the time to share about yellow dig right now and be just hearing your perspectives. So because I know a lot of people who are tuning into this video probably just want a sample of what is this yellow dig and why is that such a strange name. First of all, the name comes from yellow the color of knowledge dig to unearth. So we're digging in and trying to learn more. Pretty simple but also very interesting and my friend always likes to call it dig dug because you can't remember yellow dig. So with that said, one of the things that both Haley and Eric and Dan all brought up in this is the pedagogy or I like to call it who to go G or Andrew go G shift in learning. And I that is actually a pretty important thing to understand as Haley said maybe it isn't what you want to talk, including your class as Dan mentioned there are times and he wants people to talk about specific things. Those are all good questions to have going into the design. No matter what you decide to use yellow dig for and Eric we we do have situations where people are using yellow dig in a capstone type of course, because we can modify how the points, the automatic points are set up. So just something to think about also. So no matter. So being thinking about it ahead of time is probably going to be most advantageous to you and you have this terrific design team I've gotten a chance to work individually with Matt and you Megan and it's been fantastic so when you're thinking I want to use yellow dig I just want to have automatic grading for my discussions. That's actually not what yellow dig is going to do for you yellow dig is about engagement, which is what I heard from you yellow dig is about creating that community creating recreating a virtual space as if it were in person around that seminar table. So with that said, I am going to take a little bit of time and I'm aware of the time we have on our on our session today I'm just going to take a little bit of time to explain that pedagogy element. And then I actually have a sample from one of your classes. And it was Tim Braw Lauer Braw Lauer, and he said if anybody wants to talk to him he's also happy to talk to you. I think he's working with a 600 person class this term. So I know that the theme of today's session is more with less and as was brought up by Haley is less time grading. One thing we didn't talk about is less time designing. So a lot of times in the design process we're coming up with those weekly prompts or those weekly conversations. That will go away with yellow dig as we explore this a little bit more that quicker to adapt to changes in information it sounds exactly what Eric is doing right now gathering information in real time from his learners to help with keeping updated in the course. And then this motivation for learning and instructors we heard this for learners and instructors we heard this we heard this loud and clear and I appreciate Megan's comment of this was the most engaged I ever felt in this program. Because that is really what we're looking to do it yellow dig is to create a space for belonging and engagement. So with that said, and Haley you actually gave me a good head start on explaining this slide. In traditional social assignments where maybe you have an instructor come in and post a question to get people started. Haley explained it perfectly in that what started to happen is there wasn't that connection and conversation is that people were using it as a as a deadline for assignments that's fine these students are busy we we get it and deadlines are important to them. My niece who is going to her master's program for nursing. We were on vacation together and she was taking a course online and I said do you have any work to do. And she said yeah I just have this assignment do on Wednesday night by midnight. And then I've got to go find some other people to make a comment to like oh that's the discussions. Okay, you're thinking about it as an assignment and I was always an instructor who was trying to get that conversation. And then I realized well that's not how we're set up, which is what our instructional designer director when I worked at Regis brought up as well. They were looking to impact a big change they were looking to create this engagement. And they recognized that in order to achieve that goal, they needed to switch. They needed a new academic technology a new way for learners to come in and say oh, this is new for instructors to say oh, this is different. So now in the yellow dig community with the idea. So we do have in that first week especially for people who are new to yellow dig and aren't familiar with it we do have the instructor coming in and. Hey, let's talk about this or let's make some connections to what you're learning and reading. But then as we kind of go throughout the class we're no longer constrained by time. Because as Eric mentioned people do go back they do go back and here I am in week six learning about something that I saw somebody post in week five. Let me go back now and I can scaffold and build on that conversation. And as we'll see with the point system it is there is a design in there to encourage learners to come back every week to earn their weekly points. However, it's it's not based on you've got to do this by Wednesday night at midnight anymore. And like Haley said which I 100% agree with is now when you do have the learners to and they do get sick the things do come up in life. And we want to be able to give them the opportunity to make it up. It's now the oneness is off of us and it's on yellow dig because it's built into yellow dig that they could work extra for the weeks that they're able to participate. So we don't and I like you Haley it sounds like I was always nervous about being consistent in my extra credit. Like who do I give it to why don't I do it so that's also built in here. Typically when we're thinking about yellow dig we are thinking about that motivation both extrinsic and intrinsic both learners and instructors. Eric already brought up this course relevance piece and talking about topics and how they shape that conversation. And then Haley brought up being able to go in there and award extra points if a student is going above and beyond. That's one minor way instructors can be present in there. And then we've got some built in data that's in yellow dig that helps you is the instructor and designer. No OK this is working that's not working this students falling behind this person's making connections we have engagement all for that you can check out. So for you all, I do have an anonymized real example here of a post in and in the I forget the number of the class in the earth in the earth class. And so this is the instructor does not tell the learners what to talk about. He does share these kind of topics. So this one is how and also I'm kind of in awe of being with this group of people that are doing really important work about sustainability. So how the ETM gives us a glimpse of earth in 2100 is a topic. So that's a topic to encourage learners to focus about this. But then the instructor doesn't say please talk about this by this state. So this is an example of a learner coming in talking about what they're learning in class, including a survey. Just to get a quick pulse on what the rest of the class sees. Will we learn from our past 21% we keep repeating the past 79% a little discouraging, but it gives us an insight of what's happening. We can see that there are 39 votes cast, and there were 38 comments. So if we're thinking about that traditional social assignment where you're commenting once and then we're applying twice. I mean, this is, I can't even do that math how many times more engaged that is. One other thing I'd like to point out on this is this is called an accolade it looks like a badge or a sticker. And what the instructor does so for for this large class of almost 600 people, what the instructor uses to show the learners that he's in there and paying attention is accolades. So not everyone does that, but that this would be what Haley is talking about when you want to go in and say, yeah, this is above and beyond. Here's your accolade that can that also can award extra points. I'm going to take a pause real quick because I saw something in the chat. You can also know three things design your own accolades to right. I thought that's right. Yeah. And we've got some fun accolades out there that are course relevant. So then this is just a snapshot. This is one of the reports that are built in and this is from a completed course in the fall. And in this class, there were 374 learners. They hit over a million words. One of the things that the three of you Eric Dan and Haley, I was thrilled to hear is that well, is that learners were coming in with rich content, making connections to what they're learning. And yes, the point system is based on participation how and so we can see that in this last fall, they hit over a million words. So it's pretty cool. And we can see just an overall snapshot in that 16 weeks. There were over there almost 3500 posts over 12,000 comments. And then their reactions, which are your thumbs up your smiley faces, which actually I loved that as a teacher because I didn't always want to add on. I didn't want to interrupt conversations and I didn't want to say, oh, that's a great idea. I would just give that thumbs up to show them I'm here. I'm listening. I'm part of this community. And then this conversation ratio now this is over all time, but the conversation ratio is how many comments to a post. So if we think traditional, we're thinking one post to comments that number would be a two. So we are we are above that. We also need to take into consideration other things that we have, which is the learning size, but we also have a way to see how many people are connected. Make sure that no one is out there posting and not getting any responses. That's all part of our reporting system. Okay, I'm going to stop sharing. Check out. If I can have one minute just to bring up yellow dig, then we can we can share our website where you can request a demo. There's a self-paced demo. We've got lots of little information in there, but I'll just do a real quick. This is yellow dig. And so this is yellow dig. As Eric said, it is a single scrolling feed that we see the posts and the comments in that format. That wasn't how I thought when I first started using yellow dig. So there are other things that can help us sort. One thing I do want to point out is if you go to sort and you go to active posts, that's going to bring up your most active posts and in order. So that's a great way to see, well, what is it that is encouraging learners to connect with one another and what is it that they're interested in talking about. And those reports that are built in for instructors, they're all right here. You each instructor has access to it. And like I said, we have a lot more to share, but hopefully this will get you started in thinking about, oh, there's another way and another way we can do it here. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you so much, Jeanine. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen as well, because I do want to make everyone aware of the fact that Jeanine has been so fantastic to us. And she has actually helped us set up an EMS sandbox that anyone within the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences can go ahead and pop into that sandbox and test it out for yourself. Going and test it out. I believe everyone would have what a facilitator role. Is that correct, Jeanine? By being invited like this, they'll get the student view, but we can promote them to facilitator. Okay. And I do need to make sure I have this. So I'm just going to do a quick copy. Okay, sure. And I was actually going to pop that in the chat window as well. As well as the instructions and I want to give Jennifer Bab a shout out. She tested this for me and made sure that everything worked as it needed to. So that is in the chat window. There we go. There's the link to the sandbox and like we said, Jeanine will help us promote everyone to a facilitator role so that you can go in and check out the tool for yourself and see what it's like to actually go in there and make posts and to respond to posts and to give accolades and things along those lines so that you can really get that experience in terms of what it's like what to use the tool, which I think is a really beneficial thing to have an understanding of the tool before you actually have to implement it. Yeah, Eric. Just real quick, one thing it's 1295 for the semester for the student. But the great thing is, it's only 1295, like for yellow dig and they could be using it in multiple courses they don't have to pay other licensing fees other than that. So it was a little hesitation because I like to use free tools but I mean I think that students didn't mind one bit just paying 1295 and that's the only cost that there is for it so it's very affordable. I just wanted to make sure everybody was aware of that. Yes, thank you and I appreciate that especially as we seek to reduce costs, as well as, you know, increase the quality of the experiences right so thank you so much for highlighting that. And yeah, like you said it is a very nominal fee, especially compared to something like a textbook. And when you pay that one fee and you have it for the entire semester I mean, it's, it's less than a dollar per month. Well, less than a dollar per week in order for students to engage in this tool. So if you are interested in a consultation, please reach out to Stevie Rocco she is our director of learning design, and she can help guide you to a learning designer who will help you get oriented to yellow dig and help you get set up. And here you can see her contact information on the screen but I'm sure everybody knows Stevie as of right now she's done so much for us in terms of promoting our unit for the college and helping the college understand what it is that we really bring to the table as a learning design team. But if you need her contact information is there. Thank you so much everyone for joining our session today we we look forward to seeing you at the next one. Thank you. Take care.