Encouraging student engagement, interaction, and learning via online discussion boards: Reflections on using Yellowdig in the COVID-19 era

Abstract

In the COVID-19 era, Yellowdig (an online discussion board with social media-like features) has increasingly risen to prominence in higher education. Reflecting on a multi-year experiment involving 14 international business and marketing courses, I argue that Yellowdig remains a valuable tool for learning even after returning to face-to-face classes. Nonetheless, my experience also highlights its limitations. While Yellowdig is not a panacea for social learning, it can provide a versatile platform for student interaction and engagement, provided that instructors maintain a clear purpose and realistic expectations. I present key considerations to help instructors optimize their use of Yellowdig.

Keywords:

• Discussion boards
• learning
• social interaction
• student engagement
• Yellowdig

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Gary Barnes and Daniel Sullivan for their insights, suggestions, and professional opinions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 More recently, Shea and Bidjerano (2010) proposed the addition of a fourth construct to the model: learner presence, referring to self-efficacy and individual effort. For a more detailed literature review of the community of inquiry model, see Rourke and Kanuka (2009).

2 The company recommends a conversation ratio (total number of comments divided by total number of posts) of 8 or more. While the pedagogical value of focusing heavily on encouraging comments/reactions rather than original content is up for debate, Yellowdig’s developers contend that “the intended purpose of the gamification point system in Yellowdig is to alter behavior, not assess it, and to get students interacting with their peers” (Savvides et al., 2019).

3 Three outliers from Fall 2020 were excluded from the calculation: 542.3 and 154.6% (minimum word counts were accidentally left on Yellowdig’s default settings) and −37.8% (due to teething problems, several students were granted a make-up assignment late in the course, which allowed them to post short comments).