Harmonize and Yellowdig both focus on increasing student engagement through online discussions.
But what makes Harmonize a better solution?
Content is harder to discover and segment in Yellowdig because it’s a single, long feed per course that sorts differently based on student behaviors.
Harmonize’s full suite of online discussion & collaboration tools provides students and instructors with everything they need to have vibrant course discussions, including: image, video & PDF annotation, chat, polls, and Q&A. Content is structured naturally and can be segmented by weeks, which makes it easier to come in with a singular focus.
With discussion board cards, an instructor flips a card to interact with a student’s content, allowing you to discover content at a much more granular level.
When it comes to conversation pacing, Yellowdig can get students to engage in a way they’re familiar with — but it doesn’t stop the flood of 11:59 submissions from piling up on your Yellowdig feed.
With Harmonize, instructors can use multiple due dates or Milestones to help students remember deadlines and regularly contribute to discussions. You can use them in conjunction with notifications to set clear expectations, remind students of approaching due dates, and pull them back into the conversation — all of which promote ongoing engagement.
Yellowdig’s grading system is not based on an instructor’s notion of quality and expectations for a specific week. Instead, it’s based on earning points in that single discussion thread. The instructor defines “participation windows” when students can earn points.
Harmonize allows an instructor to roll up conversations for that week and either let the system auto-grade those and/or give a quality based grade based on the content. You also have time-saving functionality, including:
Yellowdig lumps all classroom discussions together into a single, long running pool of commentary, like a Facebook feed per course. If you’re accustomed to the standard LMS paradigm: “in week 1, we are going to talk about…” and then structuring your class and existing discussions in your LMS around modules/week, then this comes with a learning curve and a course redesign to make it fit.
Harmonize doesn’t want to change an instructor’s pedagogy, which would come with a high adoption burden. Instead, we take the paradigm used by LMSes, with which instructors are already familiar, and focus on implementation. i.e. creating discussion areas specific to a topic and motivating students to visit focused, multimedia-rich spaces until they have accomplished their goals.
If you’re someone who likes to dig a little deeper, explore our breakdown of key differences. Our goal is to be as accurate as possible, so if you feel there is something we should add, remove, or change, please contact us here.
Rich multimedia
Help students express themselves by posting images, video, audio, or text
Milestones
Help students see what’s expected of them, and when, so they make substantive, on-time contributions
Streamlined grading
Save time for instructors with LMS gradebook integration and autograding
Student facilitation
Give students control of discussions with tools that encourage them to contribute.
Reactions & tagging
Improve participation with tools that bring everybody into the conversation
Image, Video & PDF Annotations
Provide interactive feedback and help students engage more deeply with content
Plagiarism detection
Integrate Harmonize with your plagiarism software to auto-detect unoriginal content
Chat
Enable students and instructors to communicate privately or in groups
Polls
Assess comprehension and knowledge with polls that engage the whole class
Q&A boards
Let students answer each others’ questions with public boards
Use Harmonize with any major LMS. Harmonize feels so familiar to instructors and students that there’s virtually no learning curve.
It’s simple to get started — Harmonize plugs right in!
To ensure academic integrity, Harmonize then integrates with the major plagiarism detection services, like Turnitin or Unicheck, to ensure that the students’ work is authentic.
Learn how our online discussion and collaboration tools can elevate the learning experience at your institution.
Institutions of all sizes use Harmonize to improve student engagement, collaboration, and inclusivity in their online courses — all while saving instructors time. Harmonize seamlessly integrates with Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle and D2L Brightspace to enrich discussions within already existing platforms. See it for yourself in a personalized demo!
In our 30-minute call, you will:
Learn how Harmonize creates a more engaging and inclusive experience for students (and instructors!)
Share your goals, and we’ll discuss how Harmonize can help you reach them
See Harmonize’s suite of modern discussion and collaboration tools in action
Fill out the form on this page to book a call with a member of our team and see Harmonize in action!
