Appendix A — Yellowdig for this Course

Yellowdig is a community-oriented discussion platform.

Most importantly, read a lot, and comment often.

This is your community to help create and the more quality you put in, the more quality learning you’ll get out!

A.1 Yellowdig Points and Canvas

In Yellowdig you get “YD points” for how well you engage with others by posting or commenting or for receiving comments, reactions, and accolades from other people.

Posting early and often with thoughtful content, and continuing those conversations will improve your learning about each other, other projects, and data science.

A.1.1 Weekly Point Targets

This course is set up top award points by week and each week (Sunday through Saturday) has a target of 1000 total YD points.

  • Each section will be on the same calendar week.
  • Given the academic calendar, I have “merged” the first two weeks, the last two weeks, and the spring break week with the week that follows.
  • That means there are 14 “YD weeks” and a target of 14,000 YD points for the course.

Each “YD week” also has a limit of points of 1,350.

  • Thus you can earn extra points each week up the the limit in case you know you will have a week later on where you might not post as much.

A.1.2 Earning Points

Points are awarded based on a set of rules around the length of the post and peer reaction to your posts.

  • The goal is to incentivize slightly longer more thoughtful posts than just simple responses, e.g., “Great post” does not earn a lot of points.

You can track your point earning in the main point display at the right and get even more information in the “Show Details” area beneath that.

That area also describes how your grade is calculated.

A.1.3 YD Points and Canvas Grade

There is a single Yellowdig assignment in Canvas worth 100 points.

Accumulated YD Points are automatically converted and pushed to Canvas as a percentage where they are converted to Canvas points with a maximum of 100 as seen in Equation A.1.

\[\min\left(\frac{\text{Total Points to date}}{\text{Total Target Points to date}}\times 100, 100\right) =\text{Canvas Score} \tag{A.1}\]

  • Each “YD week” the denominator will update, e.g., after 3 “YD weeks} the denominator will be 3000.
  • The numerator will be your total points accrued by that date (subject to the weekly maximum of 1350).

To understand more about points and grading, this article may help Getting Points and Passing Your Yellowdig Grade to the Course Page.

A.2 Topics for Posts

This community is intended to focus on your learning about each other, other people’s projects, and being a professional data scientist so each Post must relate to a chosen topic.

There are 15 topics, organized by purpose into four color-coded areas. Feel free to recommend others or fit posts into the closest topic. The areas and topics are:

  • Community Building: Community and ICYMI
  • Project Status: Client Engagement, Project Management, Project Updates
  • Data Science General: Data, Literature Reviews, Methods, Packages, and Tools, Quarto, Latex, SCSS, Responsible Data Science, Generative AI/LLM
  • Professional Development: Interviews, Job Searches and Resumes, Networking/ Mentoring, Online Presence

A.2.1 Individual Topics

Community Building is where to post about yourself and ideas of general interest.

  • The ICMY is for topics about data science that you find especially interesting or innovative.

Project Status is were you can post about the success and challenges of working with your clients, questions about project management processes or tools.

  • Project Updates is where you will post your weekly slides for all to see and provide feedback.

Data Science General includes topics that might be important in completing your project.

  • You can post questions or comments here to solicit peer feedback or provide tips and lessons learned.

Professional Development topics cover elements of the course and the profession important to your success outside of your technical competence.

A.3 Engaging in the Community

Engage in the community by making posts or commenting on other member’s posts.

To create your own post, select the CREATE button in the upper right corner.

  • Select a topic. (You can select more than one)
  • Add a title, and your thoughtful and relevant content, and
  • Attach things with the buttons in the post editor.

To comment on someone else’s content, select the Comment or Reply buttons in the lower right corner of their post.

  • Creating a comment works just like a post.
  • Add emoji reactions to others’ posts using the smiley face at the bottom left!

You can do @mentions to get the attention of someone in your community by typing the @ symbol and then adding their name (e.g., @JaneDoe).

Messages in the editor will tell you if you are earning points. Don’t forget to click submit!

  • All points should be immediately rewarded.
  • If you think you have not gotten points you should, check your point log in the “Show details” area beneath the main point display.
  • The most common reasons you might not have gotten points are:
      1. You were already at the maximum you could earn in a given period,
      1. your post/comment was not long enough, or
      1. your community requires certain topics.
  • You should also know that you don’t get points for giving out reactions, but rather for receiving them from others.

A.4 Yellowdig Groups

Multi-section classes may be organized into Yellowdig Groups.

  • If so, each person will be in a group named with their section number.
  • Your posts will include your section number.

A.5 Finding Posts

There are many useful searching, filtering, and sorting options beneath the Create button.

Multiple filters can be used together to find increasingly specific content.

  • You can add one Topic to a filter and also add a Group.

As an example, to find the weekly slide updates for your section:

  • Use the Filter button.
  • Select Topic: Project Updates.
  • Select Posts (this will remove comments).
  • Select your Group.
  • You can also set the date range if you need to find posts in a certain date range.
  • You can select posts from an individual Member as well.

A.6 Getting Help

Any time you have a question about Yellowdig you can click on the questionmark icon at the bottom-left of your screen.

  • For a brief crash course on Yellowdig’s main functions, see the Yellowdig Quick Start Guide.

  • To learn more, you can also explore the Yellowdig Knowledge Base.

The rules here are simple, make posts and comments that spark good conversations about topics that help your community, be respectful of others with different backgrounds and opinions, and don’t be afraid to have some fun while doing it!

💛Happy Yellowdigging! 💛