Yellowdig Faculty Guide

The Center for Distributed Learning (CDL) presents Yellowdig, an online learning community platform. Yellowdig offers an innovative way for students and faculty to interact and discuss course topics. Using a social media interface, users can take advantage of media, polls, and reactions to enhance discussion. It also provides analytics to better understand individual and community engagement. The automatic grade pass-back from Yellowdig to Webcourses@UCF helps faculty spend more time actively engaging with their students. 

Due to a limited number of Yellowdig licenses, the priority is to allocate them to support UCF credit-bearing, academic courses. This ensures that resources are focused on directly enhancing the academic experience for students.

Is it Right for Me?

Yellowdig may be a good fit for you and your students if:

  • You want students to engage in discussions but do not want to create distinct prompts for every week.
  • You have a large class and cannot manually grade every discussion post.
  • You are comfortable with students generating their own discussions (note that the instructor creates the topics that the students choose from).
  • You do not feel the need to look at every single post.
  • You are comfortable being an active contributor in the discussion community.

Want to check it out? View a Yellowdig online interactive demo here. Or watch a recorded info session delivered for UCF in November 2023 (Passcode: ^y#j5TN#). 

Resources

If you choose to use Yellowdig, the following resources may be beneficial as you get started.

Tip: When you set up Yellowdig in your course, it comes with a recommended set of default settings. We suggest using these for your first time teaching with Yellowdig, but feel free to adjust and customize them to fit your needs. 

Getting Started

  • Yellowdig Startup Guide: This CDL-created guide provides a step-by-step walkthrough of the following:  
    • Enabling Yellowdig in your course
    • Creating the Yellowdig community
    • Setting up earning windows
    • Configuring the point system
    • Selecting topics and accolades
    • Setting notifications
    • Importing the Yellowdig FAQ page to support students
    • Creating reminders for students to participate
    • Facilitating the community
  • Tell Your Students About Yellowdig:  This guide has a helpful template you can use to add to the Yellowdig assignment.

Communication and Features 

  • Yellowdig & the Gradebook: This guide helps clarify how the points work between Yellowdig and being passed back to the Canvas Webcourses@UCF gradebook.
  • Search, Filter, and Sort: Having trouble keeping up with posts and comments, or wanting to find a post quickly? This guide provides some quick tips on how to easily navigate through the Yellowdig feed.
  • Community Interaction Strategies: This faculty guide can help you in clarifying the instructor’s role in the community.
  • Flagged Posts: Both faculty and students in a community can flag posts that may seem inappropriate, worrisome, or plagiarized. When flagged, the post is hidden from the community and the instructor can review the post (and re-display the post if needed).

Certification Modules

  • Instructor Certification Course: These are free asynchronous modules that walk you through all of Yellowdig’s best practices, explain how to get started, and leave you with a plethora of follow up resources. The typical amount of time needed to complete the course is an hour. It is HIGHLY recommended that you complete this training before teaching with Yellowdig.
  • Facilitator & TA Certification Course: These are free asynchronous modules that serve as a concise guide to facilitating and managing ongoing Yellowdig Communities as an Instructor, Teaching Assistant, or member of an instructional team.
  • Yellowdig Training Modules: These are all of the modules that are currently available including STEM, Data Analysis & Efficacy, Co-curricular Community Building, Corporate Community-Building, and Organization Administration.

Technical Support

  • Help and Support: Have a question or running into technical issues with Yellowdig? This link provides technical guides as well as a link to Yellowdig’s support team. Their team will be able to handle any technical issues you or your students may encounter.
    • Help Button: In your Yellowdig community, there is a Help button in the bottom left-hand corner. You and your students can access that button at any time to reach out to Yellowdig’s support team.
  • Yellowdig Status page: If you or your students are encountering any technical issues, you can double-check the status page to see if any downtime has been reported with the system.
  • Commitment to Accessibility: In case you have any accessibility concerns, Yellowdig is AA compliant and provides a list of their commitment to accessibility.

Design and Facilitation Support

Still wondering how to integrate Yellowdig into your course to align with your modules or objectives? For pedagogical questions, contact your assigned instructional designer.

Students do not incur any additional charges for the use of Yellowdig in DL-Fee Eligible courses (MR, W, RL, RS, VL, and V) because the license is paid in full by the distance learning fee. And for a limited time, Yellowdig has been partially funded for P, M, and ML course modalities for the Fall of 2025, Spring of 2026, and Summer of 2026. Students in these course modalities may use Yellowdig without incurring a payment. When setting up a new community for P, M, and ML courses, please select the “P/M/ML Modalities” sub organization when prompted to do so.

Please review the credentials for online teaching page if you would like to learn more about course modalities.