Interview with Shaunak Roy, Yellowdig - Innovators in E-Learning Series

People learn from each other and in online courses, the quality of interactions between students in their collaborative activities and with instructors is very important. Welcome to an interview with Shaunak Roy, founder and CEO of Yellowdig, a social learning platform that has been developed with the goal of enhancing the learning experience.

1.     What is your name and your relation to e-learning?
My name is Shaunak Roy, and I am Founder and CEO of Yellowdig, a social learning platform for education. I started Yellowdig with the fundamental believe that there is something magical about peer learning. Casual conversations, exchange of ideas, or occasional debates help form meaningful bonds with other learners, which make learning more fun, and real. As I look back into my own MIT and IIT days, I realize that I have learned as much from my peers as I have from my favorite professors. Some of those bonds have lasted well beyond those formative years and have morphed into lifelong friendships.

Shaunok on the video program, LifeEdge

2.     What is Yellowdig and what does it do? 
Yellowdig is a social learning platform that merges and combines the power of group learning and rapidly expanding real-time content from the internet into a seamless and easy to use learning platform. Yellowdig is Software as a Service (SaaS) that integrates into all Learning Management Systems (LMSs) and Portals to offer 1-click socially intuitive groups for a variety of use inside and outside of courses. For example, Yellowdig can be added in an individual course within minutes to offer a FERPA compliant, private and moderated collaboration forum for your course.

3.     How is it different than other collaboration apps?
The advantages of Yellowdig over other popular collaboration APPs such as Facebook Groups, Slack, and Yammer are the following :

·       1-Click Signup : Learners join the platform by clicking on a “Yellowdig” button in the Learning Management System (LMS), no separate registration required

·       Automatic grading and gradebook sync : Instructors can set up a points system to encourage learner participation, that is fully customizable from course to course.

·       Privacy and moderation : All the content remain private to a course and can be moderated by the Instructors and admins encouraging deeper and authentic participation.

·       Customization : There are many out-of-the-box and  custom configuration options available to support a variety of use cases and learning needs

4.     How are universities using the app? 
Yellowdig is bring used by over 40+ institutions and 140,000 learners across online, blended and residential courses and MOOCs.

5.     Many collaboration applications are not used in courses because they require so much extra time from the instructor.  How does Yellowdig approach that problem? 
We recognize that engaging students through prompt driven discussion and manual grading of discussion posts is a major time sync for instructors. In fact, this type of discussions tend to lower the quality of engagement as it feels less like organic sharing of ideas and more like assignments for the learner. Yellowdig, though peer driven discussion and automatic grading, substantially reduces instructor time commitment while improving both quality and quantity of engagement.

You can refer to our blog for many stories from instructors on how Yellowdig has helped them improve their instruction without increasing workload.

6.  What are your plans for the future?
We plan to continue to build our vision of making learning more engaging and real-world. We plan to add more features and data capabilities to help instructors and students get more from their learning experiences, from anywhere, at anytime and from any device. Our competitive advantage is our focus on working closely with our instructor community to co-curate the future of eLearning.

Check out Shaunak Roy on LifeEdge! https://youtu.be/SI-Y-bsHylg 

Free Canvas Tutorials for Instructors and Designers

Canvas is a virtual learning environment and also a learning management system that makes it easy to collaborate through its incorporation of Google Apps.

Free Canvas Tutorials Playlist

It is also ideal for individuals who would like to offer their own course, since individual accounts are free.

The flexibility of Canvas has made it the LMS of choice for MOOCs, and many universities are transitioning to it because it is easy to integrate and can be launched with a minimum of disruption.
 
I've put together two collections of video tutorials for Canvas. Here are six samples that I've uploaded into a YouTube playlist.

Here's the link to the playlist
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfLhA1Ju1dqFLEW7B0HqPGapLH-BKhtJQ 

Here are the titles:
Planning and designing using learning objectives
 

Building collaborative presentations

Wikis

Learning through Collaboration

Assessment and Learning Objectives in Canvas

For More
Overview of the full Quick Start Guide to Canvas Video Course (with free sample):  35 modules / more than three hours of video guidance
https://www.packtpub.com/game-development/quick-start-guide-courses-canvas-video

 Overview of Canvas for Collaboration (with free sample) - 30 modules / 3 hours 10 minutes of instruction

Loving Canvas LMS!: New Training Courses - Collaboration & Quick-Start Guide

Many colleges, universities, and training organizations are moving away from the learning management system they have used for years and are adopting Canvas.

Canvas, which is a learning management system, can also be considered a virtual learning environment (VLE) because offers cloud-based hosting and can integrate with a number of cloud applications, such as Google applications (Docs, Drive, Sheets, Slides), Microsoft 365 applications, and media hosting (YouTube, for example). In addition, Canvas encourages webinars (live and archived) by building in Big Blue Button.

Also, Canvas offers free hosting to instructors who can create their own courses (which are, in effect, MOOCs if they catch on) and offer them through Canvas’s portal.

Canvas is not as flexible as Moodle, and it does not have as many built-in templates as Moodle’s Virtual Learning Environment competitor, MoodleCloud, but it does offer remarkable simplicity.

In addition to making collaboration very easy, the SpeedGrader function in Canvas is a huge hit with students and instructors alike.

That said, changing to a new LMS can be daunting, even if you are very familiar with Blackboard, D2L, Moodle, as well as the commercial solutions.

Easing the pain of transition was one of my main goals of putting together training courses.  I also really wanted to help unlock the joy of discovery, unleashed creativity, and productive collaboration which is possible with Canvas.

Rather counter-intuitively, I started with Collaboration with Canvas.  I wanted to help students, instructors, and administrators jump in and explore the many ways in which Canvas facilitates collaboration.

People learn from each other. Moodle has long made a discussion / forum-focused approach the cornerstone of connectivist / connectionist learning theory.  Canvas embraces this approach, as people can easily share and collaborate on documents and presentations in order to create group projects and portfolios.  Also, Canvas makes it possible to use the discussion board as a blog and to subscribe to it via RSS feed.

Canvas for Collaboraiton

 At any rate, I explored these and many other ways to collaborate in Canvas for Collaboration, which is a 6-unit, 30 module course:

https://www.packtpub.com/web-development/canvas-collaboration-video

• How Canvas works for many different applications
• Canvas and collaborative activities for academic applications
• Group editing best practices
• Using Canvas for event planning
• Using Canvas for building a product with distributed team members
• How to collaborate to demonstrate learning goals and compliance
• How to assess the end products of collaborations
• Collaborating using different types of media
• Compliance training

Quick-Start Guide for Canvas

Then, I backed up a bit and created a 6-unit, 30 module course on getting started in Canvas. Entitled Quick Start Guide for Courses in Canvas, https://www.packtpub.com/game-development/quick-start-guide-courses-canvas-video, the objective is to provide all you need to create great courses in Canvas.

This course is a practical guide filled with examples. It covers the basic and advanced concepts of Canvas. Every recipe is as simple as possible without compromising creativity.

In this course, you can

• See the best way to plan and design an online course
• Discover the unique features of Canvas and how to use them
• Get to know the best way to organize content
• Understand how to incorporate multimedia
• Know how to use Canvas’ social media features
• Make sure that students achieve their learning goals and objectives
• See different forms of assessment in Canvas
• Use Canvas’ features to motivate and encourage students

I truly enjoyed creating the courses, and I hope that taking them and participating in them is as enjoyable for the learner.