I love that Yellowdig engages students where they are, in a format they are familiar with, and encourages deeper and more meaningful conversation the longer it is used. What I have noticed is that student responses become more divergent and more intentional the longer they use Yellowdig. Students are not parroting what I think, nor are they parroting what their peers have said. Rather, they are attempting to articulate unique vantage points OR continue conversations with other connections and questions.

The thing I like the most about Yellowdig is that students are encouraged to go above and beyond what they would normally do, and then they share their work with others.

As a former tenure track and adjunct professor who assigned online discussions in Canvas, Blackboard, and D2L, when I learned about Yellowdig as a learning designer and saw and read the true organic engagement between peers in an online course, I was so impressed. It's this simple: do you want your higher ed student online discussion to be about quantity (post once a week and reply to two peers' posts) or do you want it to be quality with rich, meaningful, and course-aligned content, created and faciliated by students? I can tell you, in an 8-week online course of approximately 1000 students, that course's Yellowdig learning community had over 3000 posts, almost 30,000 comments, and close to 7000 reactions. I've NEVER seen this type of content creation and conversation in a traditional LMS discussion. Plus, Yellowdig helps you build community in your online courses and helps cultivate instructor presence. Another plus is at the end of the course, change the Yellowdig learning community to read-only status, and then it becomes a student-created course resource! Need I say more?