Yellowdig: Changing Due Dates

Yellowdig is normally set up to grade students on their weekly earning periods. You may experience situations, such as an internet outage or other prohibitive event, in which you might want to change the due date of the earning period to grant your students an extension. We strongly recommend against this, as it will affect all subsequent earning periods. We have provided an alternative solution.

Yellowdig Points Buffer

The default settings in Yellowdig allow students to earn an additional 350 points, in addition to the 1,000 points they are assigned each week. If it makes sense given the circumstances (for example, students still had the majority of days in the earning period to complete Yellowdig participation), you could encourage students to make up the points they didn’t earn during an outage with bonus points.

Adding Points Within Yellowdig

For this method, you can add points to students’ Yellowdig scores within the Yellowdig platform to account for an event that limited access to Yellowdig (Revoking and Giving Extra Points). This is recommended if there was severely limited access to Yellowdig, such that it is unreasonable to expect that students would have been able to participate.

1. Navigate to Yellowdig. In the menu on the left, expand the options for “Data”, then select “Points Report”.
2. Select all users, then click the “+/- Adjust Points” button.
3. Enter a positive number to add points to students’ totals. Add a message explaining why you are adding points. Select the correct date to give them points within the affected earning period.
4. These additional points will be integrated into the students’ scores and the Grade Passback from Yellowdig to Canvas, so you will not need to worry about future passbacks overriding this change. 

Merging Earning Periods

If you anticipate an earning period during which you do not want students to be obligated to participate in the Yellowdig community (e.g., Spring Break), you can merge two adjacent earning periods. This will reduce the total number of points students can earn, treating the two original earning periods as one long period after the merge.

Learn how to merge Yellowdig earning periods in the step-by-step guide: Use Merge Periods to Accommodate Breaks and Extend Earning Periods.

Additional Resources

• TLC Guide: Yellowdig: The Point System
• Yellowdig Guide: Revoking and Giving Extra Points
• Yellowdig Guide: Use Merge Periods to Accommodate Breaks and Extend Earning Periods