Each Yellowdig Community contains a robust data analytics dashboard for measuring and improving Community Health, which is viewable by Community Owners, Community Facilitators, and Network Administrators. Yellowdig measures Community Health along three dimensions: Sharing, Listening, and Interacting. Each dimension of Community Health is reduced to a composite percentile score, and the "ingredients" of each dimension can be visually compared to those of the average Community in Yellowdig or in one's immediate Network. The analytics dashboard also includes an automatic best practices checker, a breakdown of Topic usage per Community Member, and a sortable Member-level activity table.

The Community Health dashboard was designed to be an evidence-based pedagogical tool. You can use the dashboard to visualize usage and performance patterns, compare Network-level success metrics to Yellowdig-wide metrics, identify highly successful instructors and departments, and compare students' levels of productivity, connectivity, and attentiveness in Communities with different point settings and content strategies. The dashboard helps instructors and administrators infer correlations between recommended practices and success outcomes, identify areas of excellence and improvement in their Communities, and further hone their Yellowdig pedagogies.

Summary

The Summary tab of the Community Health dashboard gives Community Owners and Facilitators snapshots of their Community's overall and week-by-week engagement levels. While the Health Check tab provides more detailed metrics, the Summary tab focuses on just four key metrics: Total Posts, Total Comments, Total Reactions, and the Conversation Ratio. Of these four metrics, the Conversation Ratio is most important. It reflects the extent to which students are paying attention to each others' work and engaging in back-and-forth conversation. (We recommend aiming for a Conversation Ratio of at least 8.0).

By default, the Summary page shows statistics for the entire life of the Community. To see activity for just one week, select the drop-down list under Showing Activity For and choose the desired week. To learn more about each of the four key metrics, click the tooltip in the lower-right hand corner of each card (just under the drop-down list). To see which weeks were most productive in terms of Posts, Comments, Reactions, or the Conversation Ratio, scroll down to the Activity Log section of the page and select the corresponding column name to sort by it.

Health Check

The Health Check is the heart of the Community Health dashboard. The Best Practices Checklist helps instructors verify that their Community settings align with our evidence-based passive best practices and facilitates remediation where necessary. The Community Health Composite Scores give instructors a more fine-grained picture of their Community's strengths and weaknesses. Our three core composite scores are Sharing, Listening, and Interacting, which are derived from measures of how much students share with their peers, listen to their peers, and interact with their peers, respectively.

Sharing, Listening, and Interacting scores range from 0 to 100.* For most curricular Communities, these interpretive rules of thumb apply:

• 0 to 24: Deficient
• 25 to 74: Improvable
• 75 to 100: Healthy

While it might not always be possible or advisable to achieve perfect scores (depending on the use case in question), instructors should strive for scores of at least 75 across all three areas relative to the Yellowdig Global Medians. 

By default, your Community Health Composite Scores are calculated based on Yellowdig's global averages. If your Network contains enough Communities, you will have the option to select your own Network for comparison. The selectable Sharing, Listening, and Interacting columns contain graphs that show how your Community compares to Yellowdig Global or to your selected Network with respect to specific success metrics.

To follow a best practice that your Community is not yet following, click on the best practice in question. You will either be taken to the page where you can change the setting in question or receive remediation instructions. To change your comparison Network (if available), click on the field next to Comparing with:. To see how your Community compares to your chosen Network along specific metrics, click on the Sharing Score, Listening Score, and Interacting Score tabs. For explanations of what each metric means and how it's calculated, click on the tooltip in the lower-right hand corner of each visualization. 

*Each composite score is a simple average of the percentile scores of each of its constituent metrics. Percentile scores are calculated relative to the Network to which the Community is being compared. (Yellowdig Global is a meta-network.)

Topics

The Topics tab gives instructors a bird's eye view of what their students are talking about. Overall Topics Activity provides a high-level breakdown of topic-related conversations by number and percentage of posts. Topic Activity per User provides a fine-grained breakdown of each student's posting activity by topic.

To filter Overall Topics Activity by a specific topic, enter the name of the desired topic in the Filter Topics field. To sort topics by number or percentage of posts, select the respective column names. To filter Topic Activity per User by a specific user, enter the name of the user in the Filter Users field. To sort users by the percentage of posts dedicated to a specific topic, select the column name that matches the desired topic. To see a selected user's posts, select the name of the user.

By Member

This tab contains an abbreviated summary of each Community Member's activity, including point totals. (For more detailed member-level reports, go to Reports → Points Report or Reports → Member Report.)

To sort Members by activity or points, select the corresponding column name. Click on the table and use the arrow keys to scroll left or right in the table. To see a Community Member's point log, select the name of the Member.

Health Check Data Dictionary

{'Avg # of posts': 'The total number of posts in the course, divided by the number of members in the course, divided by the number of days since the course start date',
 'Avg # of comments': 'The total number of comments in the course, divided by the number of members in the course, divided by the number of days since the course start date',
 'Avg # of links shared': 'The total number of hyperlinks shared in the course, divided by the number of members in the course, divided by the number of days since the course start date',
 'Avg total word count': 'The total number of words written in posts or comments in the course, divided by the number of members in the course, divided by the number of days since the course start date',
 'Avg # of multimedia items shared': 'The total number of attachments or canvas drawings shared in the course, divided by the number of members in the course, divided by the number of days since the course start date',
 'Conversation ratio': 'The total number of comments in the course divided by the total number of posts in the course',
 'Avg # of hyperlinks clicked': 'The total number of times hyperlinks shared in the course have been clicked, divided by the number of members in the course, divided by the number of days since the course start date',
 'Avg # of posts viewed': 'The total number of times posts have been viewed, divided by the number of members in the course, divided by the number of days since the course start date',
 '% of posts with 1 or more comments': 'We consider a post to be orphaned if it never received any comments. This metric is calculated as 1 - (number_of_orphaned_posts_in_the_course / total_number_of_posts_in_the_course)',
 'Avg # of reactions given': 'The total number of reactions added to posts in the course, divided by the number of members in the course, divided by the number of days since the course start date',
 '% of connected users': 'The total number of members who have either been mentioned in a post or received a comment from another member on their post, divided by the total number of members in the course',
 'Avg # of connections': 'The total number of (comments, reactions and mentions) divided by the number of members in the course'}