YellowDig at ASE
Building student engagement at ASE using YellowDig
Starting in mid-2019, I led the adoption of the YellowDig platform for the ASE courses that I teach or co-teach. While this effort started before COVID-19, it proved to be extremely useful during the period when we moved to online-only teaching during Singapore's Circuit Breaker lockdown. I have found that YellowDig forums hit the sweet spot where students are incentivized to participate through grades (for a small percentage of the course total), but they not graded on specific content. This makes for an active and engaging forum where students are rewarded for asking and answering questions, or posting interesting information relevant to the class. The greater connectivity between students has led us to update our course assessment structure, to better allow and incentivize collective learning.
At right: A comment chain (names redacted) showing student-motivated learning. Note that there are 21 hidden comments!
An extremely dense network graph showing the replies/reactions between students in ES2802 (GIS and the Earth System) 2020 . Most of the connections represent questions or answers where students are problem solving together, or showing off interesting maps from outside the course, or techniques they have discovered. This one class generated 4,463 comments.
