All right, we are live. Hello everyone, and welcome to
our first live demo. My name is Holly Owens and my
name is Nadia Johnson and we're your hosts of At A Bed Tech.
We're so excited today because we get to do our first live demo
with Shana Groy from Yellow Dig. It is a tool that I have used in
my classroom in higher education.
It is fabulous. It has been around for.
I mean, I feel like I've seen it since inception kind of, but
it's an awesome tool. It's a long time.
I know you've been working really, really hard.
So we're excited to have you here.
Before we jump into the demo and all things Yellow Dig, can you
just give us a little bit? Tell the audience who you are,
your background, how you came up with Yellow Dig, and then we're
going to get into the good stuff we're going to get into the
demo. Awesome.
Yeah. By the way, thanks, Polly.
Nadia, thanks to be great to be here with you.
So and whoever is dialing in, great to meet you all.
Hopefully we'll have some good dark conversations as you get to
see and learn a little bit more about what we're up to.
So my name is Shawna Croy. I'm the founder and CEO of
Yellow Big. We are an Etic company based out
of Philadelphia. We work with primarily academic
institutions, higher education institutions around the country
and some other parts of the world.
At this point, Holly, I think we had about 150 universities who
have been using US and and and what we are essentially.
Yeah, it's. Yeah.
And and what we are doing essentially is to helping them
kind of make learning more engaging for their students.
Using technology. So we are a software platform,
but we like to call ourselves an education platform because we
try to focus on, you know, whatever we are doing is
actually helping their students to be able to be more engaged,
more excited about what they're learning as well as hopefully
kind of finishing their programs and degrees, whatever they're up
to do. So As for who we are, I don't
know if there's any other questions.
No, I'm going to encourage people to go listen to your
previous episodes and we'll definitely put those in the show
notes because it it is a nice timeline of all the things that
have been happening at Yellow Dig from you were the second
episode, so that was about three years ago of the show and then
we have two Where are they now episodes and now we're doing the
the live demo. So I would really encourage
people to go back and listen and also go to Yellow Dig's website
and learn more about the tool. Absolutely.
So if you wanna get into it and start sharing more about Yellow
Day. Yeah.
So let me share my screen. So what I have for the audience
is a quick presentation just to kind of set some context about
what Yellow Day is all about. And then I have a quick demo
too. So hopefully that will give you
enough flavor what exactly we are doing in higher education
before I dive in Holly. Or do you see my screen?
We got it live and in action. It's all up there.
Very pretty. Love the blue.
All right, let's dive in. So yellow big, you know, we have
been around since 2015, It's our 9th year and you know we are
very happy to work with over 150 universities primarily in the
US, North America, but also in you know Canada and in some
parts of Europe as well increasingly.
And you know, one thing I like to always say is that.
You know, we are very fortunate to work with institutions of all
types. You know, such as, as you can
see some of the logos here, Arizona State University is a
big public university which has been one of our earliest clients
to Boston University and UC Davis, Purdue and others.
So there's no one type of university we work with.
We work with community colleges fully online programs.
So the way the platform is built is to be able to support
students from all walks of life. You also have use cases in high
schools who started to adopt us. We have corporate partners who
are using Yellowdig now for various corporate training.
So that's kind of a little bit about the logo chart that we
have. And before I dive into the
actual platform, I want to give our audience a little bit of
view about what Yellow Dick does, You know, at a higher
level. So since the pandemic, we have
launched 3 different solutions in the market.
So our initial product that we launched back in 2019 was
Engage, which is in the middle. What Engage does is that it
transforms this whole in classroom or course based
learning from just purely consumption of information to a
much more community driven, engaged kind of as students are
actively participating in the learning process.
So that's our Engage solution. Then we have also launched two
other solutions. One is our Kinect solution,
which is our what we call is our early life cycle solutions where
students get invited into our platform as soon as they show
interest in a program. You know, a lot of universities,
colleges that we work with. As you know, there is a lot of
pressure around recruitment. Making sure students get to know
what they're offering, understand the differences they
offer versus all the programs they can consider, as well as
make sure that they don't melt out before they actually start,
you know, start the program formally.
So our Connect product really helps them to make sure they
create the sense of belonging early in the life cycle.
And finally, we have a Succeed solution, which is our newest
solution, which is focused on lifelong learning.
As we know that, you know, learning doesn't stop as soon as
you graduate, finish that course or program or degree, whatever
one is up to. But there are ways to remain
engaged with the academic institution so that they get
more value as a lifelong learner, maybe come back to the
program, you know, get access to newer content or research that
is coming out of the institution.
So being engaged in that process is what our succeed solution
does. With that, you know, I chose
this picture because, you know, we all in education are familiar
with this. And people who are not in
education probably have sat through some of these
classrooms. I thought this kind of graphic
explains what Yellow Rig does. Yes, right, huge lecture for the
people who are listening to the audio version.
There's a huge lecture hall full of people with the stage on the
stage, the lecture, the instructor at the center of the
room, and a whole bunch of different screens.
Yes, definitely experienced as an undergrad.
Yes, yeah. I mean and you know for Grant
probably Holly, you know the size of these classrooms are
smaller, but the the what we see is that the model is the same,
which is the stage of the stage instructor is trying to engage
the learners and it's always difficult, right.
We all know that. Why is it difficult because it's
constrained by time. You only get to see the students
once or twice a week. And space, because only you have
so many students get fit into a classroom.
And of course, you know not every student is equally
energetic or open enough to be able to talk to the professors
or talk to one another. And we all know that learning
happens through conversation, through true engagement.
Because just absorbing knowledge is not just learning, but
learning is that applying that knowledge.
We all have good stuff, but it's very hard to do.
So this is the problem we fundamentally solve.
So we try to make imagine a world where instructor does
their thing because they are teaching, but what Yellow Dick
does is naturally engages the group of students.
Doesn't matter how big is these classes are.
We have classes around 2000 students now who are taking one
class together, but they're naturally engaging with one
another without the instructor having to spend a lot of time.
So this is what the platform does.
So. How do we do that?
Like that's a real question. And before I jump into showing
the platform, I wanted to kind of show you what is end result.
So on the right side, and of course, if you're listening to
this, what we do is that we create the environment where
every learner is connecting to as many learners as possible in
that environment, in that learning environment.
So rather than kind of just talking to one or two students
around you or maybe in a discussion board like you know,
picking and choosing a few prompts or somebody kind of you
want to kind of because you are the same group.
Rather than doing that, you have this opportunity to kind of
really engage with a much broader group of students around
things that you care about, topics that are most exciting to
you, as opposed to kind of being driven by the instructor always,
which we all know is very difficult to manage.
And on the left side, I kind of put a little graphic on what is
the underlying theory behind this engagement is this theory
of connectedness. So there is this popular theory.
It's been around for a while. Started by John Dewey, which was
he's one of the founders of constructivist way of learning,
where the students are not mere consumers of information, but
they have agency to be active participants in the learning
process. And for that to happen, you need
three kinds of presence, social presence, cognitive presence,
and teaching presence. What is social presence?
Social meanings. Students feel that they are
actually part of a community. They belong there.
They're not just sitting there to be created and judged, but
they're they're there to be proactively engaging in that
environment. Cognitive presence is of course
not only just understanding the material or whatever is being
discussed. But being able to participate
proactively in that engagement, like really engaging it on the
content that is being discussed or presented and the teaching
presence is for the instructors to be able to interact not only
as the stage, on the stage, but as a guide on the side.
This is the kind of framework and this has been around for a
while, but the hard part is that and it's been well proven that a
lot of papers and research that has been done on this theory and
it's well proven, but it's very hard to implement.
Before we had beautiful technologies that you know,
digital technologies can do a bunch of these things and this
is exactly what we're doing at Yellow Day.
We are taking some of these proven practices and we are
building digital tools that can implement these practices in the
real world. So how does it happen?
So one of the things the way we have designed the platform is
what we call a simple interface but complex learning.
The simple interface that you see in the middle if you are
actually looking at the video is.
The text editor that the students have.
So as I said, students have agency in our platform to be
able to be creators of knowledge so that they can share ideas,
links, videos, blogs, articles. And I'm going to show you some
of that in the demo when we get to that.
But they can really be a pretty kind of, you know, be very
creative in the platform to be able to share their ideas and
knowledge or, you know, things that they're thinking about.
But what happens in the back end is the complex learning where
they're learning not only from the content that they're
creating, but also the content that peer group is creating and
through all the interactions and ideations and idea sharing that
happens into the platform. So I'll give you some examples.
This is an example from one of our partners.
In fact, I was in a presentation and I took the slide from that
presenter. Because I loved it.
Because this is an example of one student who kind of created
a post in Yellow Day saying that I admit, feeling intimidated.
You know, how often do we feel that we are very scared in an
environment? Of course, if you know some
topic we are not. But learning is fundamentally
kind of jumping into the base and trying to understand what we
don't know. And people are always very
scared sometimes and sometimes, you know, having an opportunity
to be able to be vulnerable. Is a great thing.
So in this example, the student says that, OK, I'm in this data
visualization class, but I've only used Excel.
I've not really used any other tool.
Is that something normal? And another student jumps in and
says that, yeah, that's kind of normal because I'm in the same
spot And somebody else says that, yeah, that is very much
normal. By the way, you can actually
benefit from like looking at these different resources.
So it's not only students kind of opening up with one another a
little bit, but they are also trying to help one another and.
Really create the sense of belonging.
And there are other things happened.
I've just pulled another example from a business course.
And again, of course these names have changed, but these content
is real, where students can have very lively debates around, you
know, things that they're learning in the class.
So in this case, you know, they're in the business class
and somebody says, puts a question that would you work for
a company whose mission you don't agree with?
Now that's a good question right in this economy.
Students have to make hard choices like do you really want
to go for the company that you're really excited about?
But then you know you may have to take a job for the sake of
it. And this these kind of
conversations sometimes students have in their minds, but they
can't really kind of bring it up, you know, in the front and
have these conversations. So all we are doing is we are
creating opportunities for the students to kind of really
express themselves in authentic way, have that agency to be able
to then be themselves. And be able to interact with
others in that community or the set of communities they're part
of to kind of really create that intellectual knowledge around
that. So can I jump in here just as a
user? Yes, And just say.
Please, yes, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Just say teaching at the graduate level and adult
learners, I feel like this is a great safe space for people to
interact, not just about like course content.
Initially the students are like, we're going to run this, we're
in charge of this. I'm like, yes, this is all going
to be generated through conversation by you.
But I found that like there was a lot of crowdsourcing that
happened in my class lecture. Great resources that were shared
that otherwise wouldn't have been shared if we were doing
like this post once, reply twice kind of discussion board
situation and the students really felt connected to each
other. By the end it was like we were
one big community. We were all together kind of
doing the same thing. It doesn't put like, well,
here's the teacher, here's the students on the other side of
the learners. It's like everybody's working
together to get towards move towards a common goal and that's
what I really, really love. And the options, like the
polling is fun, like getting people's opinions about things
and putting in videos. It's really, it was really
intriguing and my my learners who are graduate level, so
they're well into adulthood, really enjoyed it.
Yeah, no, that's that's awesome Wally and thanks for sharing
that. And you know, that's kind of
what we are trying to bring to education, which is as you said,
like you know, students have so much to say and they just need
that kind of a platform to be able to kind of express that.
So and you know this slide, you know, just to kind of summarize
some of these ideas that we're talking about is you know, what
drives the sense of belonging, which is connect with similar
backgrounds and experiences, right.
I mean often students who come to these programs, you know,
increasingly we have online programs, hybrid programs, they
come from different places. They may have not have met each
other, but when they have a little bit of conversation, they
kind of really discover that they have very similar feelings
and backgrounds and kind of being able to connect on that is
a great thing for them. Learning from each other that
where we appear to be a learning that how can happen and and
finally active reflection which is you know, not only they're
learning the content but they're also learning how to reflect
around that content and kind of really make meaning out of it is
you know that really drives a sense of belonging for the
students in our platform and for the instructors.
I mean, what we hear from them is.
You know, they get to learn from the students.
We, you know, it's very kind of, you know, interesting how often
we hear from instructors saying that, oh, I just had no idea
that this is happening in the real world.
And my students share this idea with me Or somebody posted in
the other day and they'll bring that into the classroom
discussion. And a lot of the classroom
discussion, which used to be a lot of work for the instructors,
would actually happen from Yellow Day as opposed to kind of
really preparing for these courses classes.
And you know interesting and unique experiences and
backgrounds. I mean instructors always feel
that they also shared with us that you know they they also
feel a sense of belonging with their students because you know
being an instructor is difficult sometimes if you if you don't
know who their students are and and and that really helps.
And having a platform like this kind of helps And one final
thing and you know and I'm kind of going to show you the
platform itself is there's a lot of data that we provide to the
instructors because. You know, having a community is
of course interesting, especially when the students
have agency. But it's also interesting to
understand that who is engaging, who is not engaging, how much
they're engaging. We have different scores in the
platform, such as sharing, listening, interacting scores
and that all mean different things.
And we track a lot of data in the background, but we kind of
try to make it simple for the instructors to understand, kind
of get a pulse on how things are going and where things are kind
of maybe not going as much. We show benchmarks.
Comparing different communities within the same network or the
institution or across the, you know, across the alerted network
all to kind of help the instructors to kind of make more
meaning out of the interaction patterns.
So with that, oh, there's one last slide I'll kind of show
before I kind of show you the platform and and kind of dig
into the some of the features and functionalities of the
platform is what does it mean for the institution, right.
Who adopt yellowdig? So typically for an institution,
often we find that an innovative instructor or instructional
designer would kind of bring in yellowdig into their program and
really start using it in a limited number of forces where
they see there is an immediate need.
But then what happens is that once the instructor starts using
it and the word spreads through the students or the faculty and
it kind of really spreads quickly from there.
Like we have institutions where we started with like 5 courses.
Now we have thousands of courses using US for some of these large
public universities. But from a from a value
standpoint, there are three big things that we see that our
clients talk about when they're not Yellow Day.
The first one is the the biggest thing we hear is the sense of
belonging And we do surveys. For example, the the latest
surveys that we did in the last quarter, 77% of our users said
that once they started using Yellow Dig that they had a
greater sense of belonging into their courses and programs.
And as you know, in these times where mental health and many
other things are big challenge. Having a sense of belonging
really helps the students to be more successful from an Academy
point of view. The second one we very hear
often is the time savings for instructors, right.
One of the biggest pushback typically for technology
adoption is additional time the instructors or the instructional
staff has to spend to adopt A new technology.
And when it comes to yellow egg, because of our game for
learning, because a lot of the engagement is actually automated
from a measurement point of view, and all of that is passed
through directly into the learning management system.
And we have functionalities like that which reduces enormous time
instructors will spend in grading discussion boards or
grading engagements, or sometimes like following up with
students who are not engaging. Or sometimes, you know, they
will have in the in answer the same questions as opposed to,
you know, same questions to multiple students they can now
answer in one community. So there's a there's a lot of
time savings that happens because of implementing yellow
Day. And then finally is the
improvement in retention, student retention, which is a
big problem not for every institutions but for quite a
few. So every 1% of the students who
are retained using Yellow Dick and we have done studies there.
If you're interested, we can share those resources with you
where institutions have seen as much as 8% on an average can go
as high as 15% improvement in retention just by implementing
Yellow Dick into their courses and programs.
With that Holly, I was just going to jump into the the demo,
but I don't know if you have any thoughts or comments.
Yeah, let's. Yeah, no, I just love seeing all
these statistics and the improvements that are being made
because of implementation of Yellowdig.
And I also want to tell people how easy it is to put it into
your classes. A lot of times you think like I
have to learn this an edtech tool and.
You know, integrated into my, my classes, it's going to take
forever. No, I did it in 20 minutes or
less and it was, it was really easy and I work with my IT group
to get it implemented into canvas and we were up and
running and the students were in there.
So everything is is is really easy and intuitive and I love
the fact that it it's it's like that because I think there's a
lot of tools out there that really do create some barriers
for people and this one does not great no thanks for sharing.
And so you know very quickly to jump into the platform then is
what you're looking at right now is yellow leg.
You know it's a web app and you can use that you know in a
mobile phone or a tablet or you know in our website.
But the the thing that to point out is that there is no separate
login password. We always follow a one click
implementation where students if you are in a course in canvas or
blackboard or any other LMS with one click from your course you
can join a yellow rig community. So in a Canvas for example, I
can show you these examples with you where every course that you
know typically this is what you're looking at is Canvas or
Ms. You may be using other LMSS. But irrespective of that when
you are in, you know in a canvas course you can integrate yellow
in a variety of ways. You can have integrated in the
left panel, you can add it as an assignment and our academic
teams kind of works with you to kind of do the integration.
But as Holly mentioned, we use LDI 1.3 which is.
Literally, are you sharing? Are you sharing the?
Just a quick, I want to make sure we get the screen up there
for the demo portion. Nadi and I are probably going to
cameras off so that the recording just has you on the
screen, but are you sharing the demo portion yet?
Because we just, we're just seeing the slide.
You know what that's a good thing that you pointed out
because I was, I was talking about another screen, all right.
So yes, could that be caught in the?
Chat. What a great teammate Bree is
the best. She always catches these things.
So thanks Bree. You can see my screen now.
Yes, there it is. Awesome.
So this is yellow League, you know it's like some things to
kind of point out here. So I'm going to show you the
simple part of yellow League, which is how the user experience
works and the integration with LMS, which is very simple.
It takes a few minutes and then you get launched from the LMS
right into the platform. But there are a lot of settings
that we allow our institutions to do in the back end to be make
sure that they implement the LED in the right way.
So there are ways to implement the loading in your program so
you can do it at a program level, at a university level.
And there are various ways to organize your communities by
various networks and sub networks and you can give access
rights in a certain way so that one college has access to one
network or sub network and other colleges and other access levels
and the data is also partitioned like that.
So I just wanted to point out is that there are quite a few
things that we have designed the platform around to be able to
hundreds and thousands of users in our institution and be able
to manage it. But from a user point of view,
from a faculty or a student or administrator point of view, it
is extremely simple to integrate.
So you can imagine imagine the idea 1.3 integration with your
learning management system. You can launch from there and
this is where you come and when you come here, this is what it
looks like. It's a very social media type
engagement platform as I was sharing where you know, you
know, users are so much used to kind of a scroll view where you
can get, scroll and see content what their classmates or their
peer group is kind of posting and commenting on.
So it's very kind of similarly designed so that you don't have
to really click multiple times to get to a post or a comment.
But what we do is that we actually bubble the content on
the top that is driving the highest amount of engagement.
So that's how the feed is filtered.
So if you come, let's say in the in an afternoon to look at the
community for your course or your program, you'll see content
that your peer group is actually engaging around at that time.
But if you come later on, you might see a different feed view
because those content is actually kind of bubbling up on
the top. So that's kind of how we've
designed it from a user point of view.
You don't have to really do much to see the most, you know,
mostly the interesting content that you would like to see.
Firstly, I want to get to the content creation because, you
know, I started with saying that it's a simple interface, but
there are complexities which is behind it.
So this is how the post creation works, and the first thing you
do is that you select topics. What are topics?
Topics are ones that your instructor or your admins Topper
design to keep the discussion on a certain set of topics that are
relevant for the community, right?
For a for a finance course for example, topics could be various
financial finance modeling exercise that you're kind of
going to learn in that part of the course.
For a different course of the program, it'd be very different.
So these are customizable. Users can select multiple topics
here. So I'm just going to show you
how different topics can be selected.
Topics can have points, not a point that we have.
This concept of points which is a game for learning approach.
I'll talk about that. So there is some amount of
embedding of points into topics so that you can create different
types of incentives for the learners.
Once you select that these are the bright things on the top,
then you can have there are other things like you know,
scheduling of posts, you can go anonymous, you can pin to top
where the posts will be kind of sticking on the top.
So there's kind of various admin level functionalities that you
have on a post. But primarily when you're in
this content area, one of the ways we have designed this is to
be very content rich. Very often our students are kind
of creating content. This is just not text like text
is. Of course you can normally done
but but you can create multimedia in the platform like
for example. And I'm just going to drop in an
image here. So you can drop in an image and
you can resize it. You can imagine like so many
courses that can benefit from having different types of image
configuration. A very popular feature is for us
to create short videos, right? You can imagine in this world we
are living in, where learners are going online, increasingly
they can actually express using saying and words, and language
learning courses can use that. Sometimes introductions of
professors or students can benefit from creating videos.
And here I'm just going to show you a very quickly what kind of
videos can be created. So it's all browser embedded.
You don't have to download anything.
It's all in the browser and and then, you know, it gives you a
pointer and you can start talking and as you're talking
it, it gets recorded. And then all you have to do is
you can just get pause or you can just kind of drop it here so
the video will automatically get get added into a post, you know,
multiple videos if you want. We recently have launched, you
know, transcription of videos so that it'll automatically
transcribe your language into a text that you can also edit.
We are supporting most languages now, so you can speak in foreign
languages. I mean, this is kind of becoming
A use case for us where foreign languages courses are using us
to have the students speak in various languages and kind of
actually also see the transcription of that.
Those videos automatically done other things like attachments
and all you can imagine different types of attachments.
Emojis drawings is a big kind of factor for us like for various
like engineering type of STEM courses, as you can imagine,
let's say I just uploaded this picture, I can just immediately
click on it and I can say, you know, I can start drawing it.
So I'm going to create a little shovel here if you know this is
special for us. I didn't need to do the last
part of that. So I can go back.
Yeah, this is a little shovel right now.
So with that I can just save it. It goes right there.
So you see this is how the feature works.
Other things, you know how you mentioned polling, quite popular
for us, so you can post something and ask feedback right
there in the poll and you can do all sorts of configuration, how
the poll will appear, whether you will see the results.
Before the user votes, After the user votes, never show the
results. Timing, whether you want to give
the students or you know whoever you're posting that like a week,
maybe a day, maybe unlimited different configurations
available and it becomes easy way for the instruct, you know,
for everybody to kind of react to one another.
The final thing I'll show very quickly is our other kind of
advanced functionalities. You can create tables like you
have tablet view you can imagine for getting feedback from
students you can want you may want to kind of you know make
information easily accessible. You can face links you know I'm
just going to show you I have a website open here so I'm just
going to show you quickly how that works so I can just paste
it a link here. What it does is that it
automatically pulls in a snippet of that article in the below so
that you get to see what the article is all about.
You can you know I'm just going to paste some code and show you
like you know if you're in a STEM course, you can essentially
go in there and select a code block and this is Python as you
know if you're in analytics you know Python is a very popular
language and if you do that you know the code can, the code gets
pretty much kind of so shown here.
Sorry it just got deleted but yeah you can imagine it can be
done. So there are various other
functions, a lot of you know, a lot of like formatting options
available and things like that. So you get a picture what what
this does, it kind of you can create pretty pretty kind of
comprehensive posts and comments.
And right below here what you're seeing here is that our point
system. So what the point system does is
that it automatically tracks participation in a certain way
and we also create incentives for our learners to share, you
know interact in a certain way that drives certain kind of
engagement. So you saw that graph before
where we are encouraging students to talk to one another.
So here as you can see, like you want 40 points for creating a
new post. If you meet a certain word
count, you get 240 points. And then if you attach the
video, you have 75 points. So we are incentivizing students
to actually be more proactive and attach videos so that the
post could be a lot more interesting for the peer group.
And these are all customizable. So what we do for our
instructors is we have an AI engine that looks at thousands
and thousands of communities to understand what kind of point
system is going to try the best results for the students.
So we have a default setting that is AI driven.
The instructors have the ability to go in there and kind of
customize the points whenever they want.
And this is on the right side. You see the little widget here
which shows you the points and it has a lot of details here in
terms of how the points work. You know you have a
participation log like how you're earning those points,
earning point settings. This kind of shows you how the
points work like your participation points.
Then you what you call a social points where you want points
because other students are interacting with your content,
which kind of is important for us to create that peer-to-peer
learning environment. And finally we have what we call
is accolades with the instructors or the admins can
give and these are the accolades where you can design these act
lists, these also points, but these are to highlight kind of
different types of content that you want to highlight in your
community. So you know these are different
examples of that. I mean you know, like great
questions, cool attachment, helpful and many other things.
So, so this kind of gives you a sense about how we're kind of
driving different types of engagement in the platform.
So let me take a pause here. Holly, I don't know if you have
any thoughts because you have used the platform in any of
these features. I definitely do and I I know
you're saying a lot about the the points and here I'll come
back on camera. I just wanted to give you the
stage. So the point saying you can set
up again that's really easy. You can set it up how you want
it to be set up in terms of the the gamification of the content
and information and it it slides right back to the gradebook.
Like Chinook was saying, there's really no, you know, unless you
have to modify things at at certain points and.
For the students. But it's really easy.
It just passes right back to your grade book and again,
you're not spending hours and hours grading discussion boards.
And what I really like is I, as the instructor get to decide how
the points are distributed and what those look like.
Obviously, Yellow Dig does a great job of giving you
suggestions of how to distribute those points so that from, you
know, in setting it up. Again, from that perspective,
it's super intuitive and it just walks you right through.
And you can add different accolades, you can add different
types of topics that are maybe frequently discussed in your
course using hashtags. It's just it's it's very much
like what we do in the real world.
It mimics things we do every day when we're out on LinkedIn,
around on Facebook, out on the socials.
And it's just something that you can just pick right up and
start, Yeah, no, yeah, thanks for that.
And yeah, we we try to make it very simple for our instructors
to get going and and and you know one of the questions we
sometimes get is that given there is so much of engagement
that is happening in our platform, what's the role of the
instructor? You know, the big role is of
course to set up the the point system and create the incentive
structure. But after that, what instructors
do is they'll come into yellow, dig, you know, once a day or a
few times a week and look at content that is bubbling up.
Like on the right side you will see trending topics, trending
hashtags. Right now it's there's no data
here. But once it's in action, you
will see those kind of things that are popping up and you get
a sense of what your students are talking about.
And what the instructors will go is that look at the high quality
content just like in Facebook and elsewhere you kind of
interact with your students, you'll do that and and and then
kind of take some of these examples into the real
classroom. And and we do have functionality
in the platform to make sure that if somebody posts
something, you know inappropriate that gets flagged
very quickly. So our we have what we call a
social governance in the platform where students can flag
poster comments if they find something offensive or something
that is not useful. And that will get taken off the
community and immediately move to the instructor queue.
We have other tools for the instructors such as taking back
points if they said something which does not should not earn
points. And then we have like word
blocking by which you cannot post certain words in the
platform as well as we are working on some AI driven like
artificial intelligence driven moderation in the platform for
institutions that have thousands and thousands of users who are
creating a lot of content. So that we automatically will
help the institutions kind of navigate that any sort of
administration using AI. So that's kind of in the that's
coming hopefully by the end of the year.
So I think that this the main point here is that as Holly you
were saying as we're trying to make it very easy for the
institutions so that they can manage you know a huge, I mean
pretty big implementation of this platform with limited you
know in house administration effort so that it can kind of
almost can go on on autobiot mode.
Yeah, it it. I can't, I can't stress enough
how easy it was. I think that's that was my
favorite part. And also like as an instructor,
you can go in and take the certification course that you
all have and you've been doing and that's free.
You don't have to pay for it. I'm going to put a link to that
in the chat and in the show notes.
The Yellow Dig certification course.
I went through it. It taught me a lot about how to
manage the platform but also how to use it successfully as an
instructor. So you definitely need to go
check that out and get get a certification.
I mean, everybody loves the nice micro credential to add to their
profile or to their resume. So go out there and get the
Yellow Dig one. Yeah.
And it just takes an R So you know, if you are interested,
you're going to learn about the platform.
Yeah, that probably is the kind of fastest way to kind of see
how the platform might help you. And I just pulled up a few other
things. Ollie is that there's a lot of
data that we collect in the platform and we try to show that
into the platform for our administrators as well as the
data is available through APIs. Many of our partners are
leveraging the API to pull the data and do their own analytics
on top of what we are providing. But inside the platform, you
know this data that you're looking at, this is a graph, the
network graph that I kind of showed you in the beginning in
the presentation here. You get to see the interactions
like and if you are sitting in those large, big classes and you
know watching the students to see what they're doing, it's
very hard to know who's talking to whom and how much.
And here you will actually get to see how these interactions
are actually developing over time and find those tools like
for example, this particular student, you know he is not
engaging with anybody and he hasn't been this platform for a
long time. So this data is available to you
and you can use this data to kind of reach out to that
student saying, hey, what's going on.
And you haven't really interacted with in this platform
for like a long time. And you not only get to see that
you have this tablet view, you get to see like you can
literally can drill down and see which student is more active in
terms of number of connections. You can look at like how when is
the last time they came. So these are the students who
never connected, but these are the students.
You know, this is a demo board, which is why it's so old.
But you will get to see the level of engagement that's
happening so that you can reach out to the students.
And we also do kind of nudge notifications from our platform,
so you don't have to do it. We can actually help
automatically send those notifications.
But but this kind of gives you an additional layer of data.
We have something called community health where we are,
we do a lot of benchmarking for the instructors and the
administration for them to understand how the networks are
growing. You know, number of post
comments, conversation ratio, which is a big factor for us in
terms of how office students are commenting on each other's
posts, which is an important indicator for us.
We do topical analysis like which topics are getting engaged
and which are not getting engaged, so that you get to see
where the focus needs to be in terms of driving more
engagement. You get to look at the data by
students to see which students are more engaged versus not
engaged and also by which topic. You have health checks, which is
an automatic kind of AI driven health check to tell you where
things can improve so that you know of course you will have a
gut feeling, but this will also help you to kind of understand
what's really happening behind the scenes.
So we kind of have a best practices checklist and if those
checklists are being met, it automatically check for it and
then also give you some of the scores that I talked about like
sharing, listening and interacting scores.
Sharing is pretty obvious. We get to see that who's
sharing. But listening is the viewing
side of things. You may have students who are
not sharing, but they're actually quite reading content,
which is a good sign. So you get to see that data as
well as interacting off and they're kind of talking to one
another. And you can compare that data
with your own institutions or globally just to get a sense
about how things are going. So a lot of other data
available. Where can you go wrong?
Every time I hear you talk about this, I just like I learned
something new. And I love the community health
section because especially like there's some weeks where the
students just, they're not talkative, they're not talking
with each other and you need to know and intervene in those
certain situations, you know, making sure that it they are
active. But also like the community
health also indicates other things.
I know we haven't really talked about like SCL, the Social.
Emotional learning aspect of this and making sure people are
OK like you when you showed that example about the intimidation
or just that imposter syndrome, like it really lends itself to
other aspects that you may not, you know like I teach completely
online so I don't get to see them besides on a screen if
that. So this platform really allows
you to connect in that way as well.
Yeah. So that's a great example.
And I think especially for online classes, I mean that
makes a lot of sense. And even if you're finding on
ground classes students are, especially after COVID, I mean,
you know, it's it's harder for students to actually make those
connections and a lot of students are not on campus.
So they are looking for a lot more flexible or hybrid
opportunities to learn. So in that environment, you
know, it doesn't matter where the student is, maybe in the
classroom, may not be in the classroom.
They have one place so that they can interact with the instructor
and the rest of the peer group. So especially after COVID, we've
seen in a lot of schools which have come back to in person
learning are leveraging Yellow Day as a way to maintain that
glue so that students are not just going to feel that they're
like, you know, out of the loop. So yeah, green. 100, Yeah.
I mean, you know, I think the best way as kind of, Holly you
mentioned, I mean we kind of stop sharing for a second, You
know, the best way to learn about the tool is, of course
there are various functionalities is, you know, if
you're interested in our website, we have a link to the
instructor certification course that will probably give you a
really good understanding of what the tool does and how it
works. If not, of course, you know, you
can reach out to us. I mean, there's a link in our
website where you can reach out to us to kind of see a demo.
If you're interested, we do monthly webinars.
You can join those and ask questions.
We have a section in the website where we have case studies with
our partners who have adopted us and kind of.
Like the three-point O stuff? Yeah, it's good stuff.
Yeah, well, I mean that's yeah, we we we have been holding those
conferences also now where we are inviting our partners.
We had a, we had over 25 universities join us in the last
conference and kind of share their experience with the
platform. So and one of the things, Holly,
we are doing is we are trying to bring our clients and
prospective clients. So anybody who is interested in
this topic kind of together and have those conversations about
engagement, I think I see that as a way for us to be able to
kind of be helpful and and and kind of have these conversations
about what's really going to help the students engage and be
successful. Absolutely.
And I think, you know, we did have a question in the chat and
Bri answered it, but there was a question about so you can have
an accolade for citations and that could be worth like 75
points. So when they're doing something,
you maybe you're teaching APAI guess.
Is what this person is asking. And you can have an accolade for
somebody who does it right or does it well the first time.
Yeah, that's a great idea. That's a yeah, that's awesome.
Yeah, that's a great idea. And I feel like these tools, the
way that you built them, sometimes people take them like
for example, the citations example, they take them to a
different level and you're like, wow, that's a really great idea.
So you have you had any like quick examples that you can
share before we go into the QA part of like?
This is what I designed Yellow Dig for, but then I see people
doing it with this. Like you said, you're in the
corporate space now. So I'm very interested to hear
how that's going and what people are using Yellow Dig for in the
corporate space because I was blind or someone just higher
education. But obviously this tool can be
used across different sectors. Yeah, no.
So I I one thing I would say the broad comment I'll say is that
what we are finding is the Yellow Dig is the technology
platform and the students is on top.
There is a middle layer in terms of innovation where instructors
can use us as a way to Crowdsource content as you said
is a big use case. We see instructors are doing
case studies on our platform where they are having students
to kind of take different roles. Sometimes you can actually
change your role in yellow date, you can go anonymous.
So you can have a case study just being anonymous and really
have get into the content in a very interesting way.
Accolades is a very interesting way.
We are seeing a lot of innovation there.
How people are using accolades, the point system AI does that,
but of course you can edit that point system based on what you
want to incentivize. If you want to incentivize more
commenting, you can actually have much higher weightage for
commenting and you can change those weightage in our platform.
So the way I see this is that you know we will always learn
from our instructors how they're using it and then we are
building features and functionalities around it to
provide more and more width of what's possible.
So yeah, I mean I mean I think that's how been our approach.
You know I think we we we're hoping to kind of continue to
build a platform in ways where we see value and of course the
data also speaks to a lot, you know so how the, yeah how the
engagement is actually depending on.
Yeah, 100%. And Bree did put a link in the
chat and I will go on the show notes as well to get the
recordings from the conference and then also your plans.
I love it how when we first started talking there was one
kind of area you were focused on and now there's three different
things. So you're really connecting you
know to like the life cycle or the the the whole life cycle of
like what a learner goes through.
And I think it's it's so important that we're not just
like. Putting in a tool that doesn't
connect them with like career resources or where to where to
step next in in their future. Because taking one class is just
like if you're you're in that one class.
But if you can connect it across and that's really what programs
are supposed to do, you got it. That's a win.
Win for sure, Yeah. The first year is such an
important time of the school, you know, just to be making sure
the students have those sense of belonging in the first year.
When so you're talking about the, there's another comment in
the chat, so talking about the AI components.
So when you're bringing in those components, like what kind of
things are, are they going, is it going to be doing?
Jennifer suggested she said checking things for like
citations, accessibility, and other ends that might be on the
rubric for the question or you know, what the the topic at hand
is. So can you give us a little bit
more insight, don't share. I know this is the question
where I say tell us about the future, but don't violate any
NDA agreements. Well, I mean, you know, I'm
coming up. Yeah, AI is a very important
topic for us. As you can imagine, there's so
many changes happening with AI and there was a very interesting
research that was done in one of our partners in University of
Illinois where they looked at use of AI which is specifically
Gen. AI or generative AI where
students are going to use Gen. AI and especially for prompted
assignments or prompted discussions, you can pretty much
take that prompt and go to Gen. AI like chat GPD and get an
answer and post it back. So there were a lot of concerns
around is that's going to drive more cheating or you know what
not. But the real question they asked
is that what happens in engagement, right.
So if students are using Gen. AI as a way to create content or
the instructors are using that, what happens to student to
student engagement? And they compare that in a group
of class. They broke the class into two
groups and students knew that. They kind of actually told the
students what their objective was, which is around looking at
the engagement levels using Gen. AI and not using Gen.
AI, which is where they use the other day, primarily when the
students are creating their own content and sharing with one
another. I think what they found was that
you know with Gen. AI the the content is a little
more longer, they're writing nicer, but the engagement is
lesser because you know there is something about when students
are a lot more authentic and they're actually kind of
engaging in organic conversation.
It's more likely students will actually engage with the
content, whereas in Gen. AI you know, it's less engaging.
So that the insight from that paper that came out, which is
kind of something, you know, I wrote a blog, blog post on is I
think we've got to be careful about how we are using AI
because AI is kind of fun way of creating content because.
But the reality is that if we create a lot of AI driven
content, we also should be ready for the future where engagement
might fall. And if engagement is an
important factor in education because that drives learning, is
that the right future for us? So do we want to really use Gen.
AI for content creation now? There's some places we want to
of course, but we have to be cognizant, right.
So that's yeah be. Intentional about it?
Yeah, exactly. So, so I think that that is one
kind of thing that came out of the paper, which is something,
you know, we had internal discussions around the other
side of AI. Where we are focusing on is to
use AI to make it easier for instructors and admins to manage
through engagement. Where one example I gave you is
that the point system is AI driven in our platform.
So that every time an instructor starts using Yellow Day, they
don't have to kind of really wonder that OK, how many points
I could give for post, how many for comments, how many for
reactions. We have analyzed the data across
you know, thousands and thousands of use cases and
implementations to be able to come to the point that OK, this
is the this is the best configuration for the points for
the best, you know, health of the community and that kind of
has helped us a lot. So those are the areas that
that's one example of that. Another example is, you know we
are looking at, you know maybe AI could be a way to summarize
content, right. So if you look at a lot of
content, a lot of discussions, can we otherwise that
information. If I just want to get a snapshot
of it, AI could be very good for that.
We we are hesitant to put AI as a mechanism to interact with the
students. I know there are AI tools where
you can go and actually interact with AI.
I think, you know, tutoring, there's a good example where AI
could be a good personal tutor, so you can ask questions, get
answers. But but we are hesitant to kind
of really make that as a central part of Yellow Dig because what
really drives Yellow Dig is this organic engagement with students
in a human to human way. And if you take that out, it
kind of loses its flavor. So.
So we want to kind of definitely the company focus on the human
to human part of it and use AI as an enabler of that engagement
without compromising this kind of interaction that happens.
I like that a lot. I like that a lot.
That's another reason I love Yellow Dig.
I don't see any other questions in the chat, but I do want to
ask one final thing before we let you go.
I definitely want to. We want to know like you know
what we you have the AI coming in the future.
What are you most excited about? That's up and coming for Yellow
Dig. You've you've expanded quite a
bit. You have a wonderful team, your
team stays with you. So that says a lot about your
company and culture. So I want to say.
Yellow Dig is a really great place to work.
If there's ever an opening you need to go check out the careers
page because they're awesome. But what are you most excited
about with with this tool and what the future holds?
No, I I think, I mean from a kind of as a company point of
view. I think the biggest excitement
for me personally, and I know many members of our team share
the same excitement is to be able to reimagine learning.
You know, one of the challenges and I've talked a lot about it,
is that we kind of sometimes go with this assumption that you
know, the the innovation in learning is going to happen
through better content creation or better, you know, kind of
creating more opportunities or making it cheaper, which is all
good. But I think fundamentally in
this day and age, we really have to think about how to engage the
students in a way that is actually joyful for them and
natural for them And and there is a lot of push in that and
that's kind of the all the partners that we're working with
this kind of believes in that kind of a philosophy.
So we are kind of seeing that grow but I think but that's
still a small portion of the universe that we are in.
If you imagine we are working at 150 universities, that's great
our our growth is happening. But I think there is like
thousands of thousands of universities and and I do
believe that in that environment where the instructor is of
course providing the content and guiding the conversation and the
the learning process. But the students can also kind
of use each other to be able to create that level of you know,
belonging and engagement that drives much better learning
outcome. Not only better mental health
because that's also a factor in that but true learning outcomes
are much better in in that where students are more agency.
That is a philosophy we are going under as we build a
company and we are adding tools and adding technology to kind of
create that environment. So that's why I call it Yellow
Dig is an education company more than anything else from a tool
point of view. From our technology point of
view, what we are trying to do now is to kind of create it to
be a safe environment, meaning it is safe and easy for the
instructors to launch Yellowdig in any type of course, of any
size of any duration of any learning model.
So we are kind of adding more functionality around it and
we're also trying to do a lot more work in the back end to be
able to implement Yellowdig in a variety of ways.
So meaning to give an example is you know when we are working
with a school let's say with a four year like undergrad program
or a two year degree program, they implement the yelting in a
certain way and manage it a certain way.
Where we are now also launching into like certification courses
where it's a one year, one month program where yelting will be
used in one month. So in that environment kind of
being able to launch in a certain way so that the learners
can get that engagement within one month is a slightly
different problem for us. So we are kind of looking at
that as a functionality. We're also adding you know like
we we just launched the the video transcription which was a
request for us where you can we love accessibility so.
Thank you. Yeah.
It's wonderful that that's a big.
That's a that was a big one that came out.
We also are kind of also we just launched another functionality
where we are going to show like roster management where students
are, let's say you are in a class of 100 students and like 5
students drop out because of our part.
You need to make sure those five students lose access in yellow
dig that used to be a manual process, but now we're actually
showing in the platform which five students are actually have
dropped off from LMS. So that data is easily
available. So yeah, there's a lot of those
things, a lot of in the details. We're going to leverage the AI
but cautiously I would say that has been the plan for us.
So I love the I train, but we want to be cautious how we are
implementing that. Yes, yes, we all do.
We're. All like we wanna be the first
thing, introduce this or introduce that.
But again, you do have to rethink that caution and also be
intentional when your approach would you do.
Well I can't thank you enough for coming on live and showing
us all the things. Yellow Dig.
I learned new stuff this time that I I'm not teaching this
semester but I'm teaching next semester.
So I'm definitely going to implement some new things and
we're going to have everything in the show notes about where to
find yellow dig. The pricing plans were to
connect with your team and and talk to everybody.
And I know you've been around that some conferences recently
because the fall conferences that are happening.
So you know, if you see Yellow Dig, go up and have a
conversation. Awesome.
Yeah. Thanks so much, Holly.
Thanks for always. It's a fun experience to work,
be with you and great to be here.
And if anybody has more questions, you can definitely
find us out. Awesome.
Well, thank you. Thank you.