Your students will automatically gain access to Yellowdig through the LMS course site if they are enrolled in a class, but you can also invite followers from outside of your School's LMS. One reason to do this is to make the course discussion more interesting by bringing outsiders into your learning community. For example:
- Industry or functional experts
- Alumni members
- Outside faculty
- Institutional collaborations
A few important points:
1. Members invited following the instructions below become partial members of your organization. They will only have automatic access to the Yellowdig boards they get invited to or other public boards within the network. They would not have access to other private boards within the network but would be able to request to join such boards. (Subsequently, board owners would have the option of accepting the corresponding requests.)
2. If you are using LMS gradebook integration, member's invited as instructed below will not sync with the LMS gradebook because their credentials do not exist in the LMS. Other student's grades will continue to sync. If passback is essential, the member will need to be enrolled in the course through your LMS.
To Invite Followers:
1. Go to the particular Yellowdig board that you want to invite followers into (select board name from top drop-down menu)
2. Click on "Invite Followers" link within the "Network" pull down.
3. Enter the email addresses of all the new members you want to invite to your Yellowdig board (separated by " , "). You can also upload a CSV file with emails listed in a column. It can help if you let people you are inviting know before sending them a Yellowdig invite to help avoid any surprise or confusion and in case the invite gets directed to their spam folder.
4. If the email domain does not match your School's official email domain, you will be prompted to confirm that you would like to invite them. Select "Yes, Proceed" to send the invitation.
5. Invited members will receive an email with a link to follow your Yellowdig board. Once a user has joined the board as a follower, the board owner can choose to make them an administrator.