Blackboard has considerable functionality to assist communication across campus, but it is lacking in certain departments.
To shore up those weaknesses, some University of Idaho instructors began using new software called Yellowdig last year.
UI Provost and Executive Vice President John Wiencek said faculty and staff began using Yellowdig during the strategic planning process as a fast and easy way to communicate across all of UI’s departments and locations.
“We looked at it, and felt it was the ideal fit,” Wiencek said.
He said Yellowdig functions within Blackboard and offers a Facebook-like feed where members in a class or group can share links, conduct polls and create a dialogue using comments and a voting system.
Now that UI purchased a contract to use Yellowdig, students and faculty will have access to it for a few years, said David Schlater, educational new media manager. He said the primary goal now is to get the word out and have faculty and students try out the software. For previous and current semesters, only about 10 courses are using Yellowdig, he said.
“That’s not too many, so we decided we should allow the company to do some trainings, sort of publicize that out so that people, you know, get an idea of what it does and see if they want to use it themselves,” Schlater said.
Wiencek said he will use this time to examine if Yellowdig will be an asset for the university.
“We’ll do a survey of faculty and students to see if it’s something that people really love and would like us to continue, or if there’s sort of an ambivalent response we’ll probably put it on pause and redirect that money to perhaps some other things we think are more valuable for our students and faculty,” Wiencek said.
He said he loved using Yellowdig during the strategic planning process. It was easy to check in on different groups and hear what people were saying, he said.
Some faculty chose not to engage with Yellowdig, instead opting to use email, Wiencek said. He said he thought most of those people do not use Facebook or other forms of social media.
While Blackboard offers many of the same functionalities as Yellowdig, it does not do so in such a user-friendly way, Wiencek said. He said he understands that it is difficult to post videos or pictures and that it does not offer discussion threads with voting features like Yellowdig does. Despite that, he said he suspects UI will take a step back from Yellowdig in the future.
“I think we have some opportunities to leverage some really basic functionality in Blackboard more broadly among our faculty and our classes and this may be sort of the icing on the cake when we’re really not addressing the core of the cake, so we’ll just see how it plays out,” Wiencek said.
While software contracts are typically expensive, Wiencek said Yellowdig was relatively cheap — about the cost of a few trips for a faculty member’s professional development. He said these learning management systems are crucial to the university’s mission of education.
Schlater said he is working to get the word out and he encouraged faculty and staff to look into Yellowdig.
“We need faculty to try it out and tell other faculty, ‘Hey this was great,’ because that is really what’s going to sell it,” Schalter said. “They’re all tools. It just depends on how engaging the material is and if it’s the right platform for it.”
Jack Olson
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