Hypothesis

• WashU licensed
• Seamlessly integrates with Canvas Assignments, Groups, and SpeedGrader
• Shared annotations and replies as well as private highlights and notes
• Use with webpages or searchable PDFs
• Can split students into small reading groups
• Ability to annotate with images, links, and videos
• Student resources, including instructions, tutorials, and guides on best practices and annotation types
• CTL managed and supported

Hypothesis makes reading active, visible, and social. A metanalysis conducted by Novak et al in 2012 suggested that social annotation tools can “lead to learning gains in higher education” (p. 47). In particular, the study found that social annotation activities contribute to “improved critical thinking, meta-cognitive skills, and reading comprehension” (p. 47). Preliminary findings in the same study also suggested that using social annotation “promotes motivation for reading and contributes to higher frequency of positive emotions and lower frequency of negative emotions” (towards the reading). In addition, Brown and Croft (2020) argue that social annotation is an inclusive teaching practice because of how it promotes collaborative knowledge building.

Easy

• Increase engagement on a reading assignment by asking students to share reactions, personal connections, or questions about a text. Such annotations make the reading experience social and spark conversations between students.
• Familiarize students with the expectations and objectives of your course by having them annotate the syllabus. This not only ensures that students read the syllabus, but also helps build community from the start.
• Help students read a difficult text together. In the instructions, ask students to raise questions about confusing concepts, share how they interpret the text, and add links to resources that define terms, provide examples or elaborate on concepts raised in the text.

Medium

• Help students do more close reading by asking probing questions or directing students to important parts of the text. Open the text in Hypothesis as a student would and add your prompts as annotations. Consider these 10 different types of annotations.
• Use a text or a section of a text to model how you would engage with it. Open the text in Hypothesis and add annotations to share your own responses, analyses, and meta-comments. You could also use this opportunity to introduce students to annotation etiquette, or best practices that make annotations more useful for others.

Advanced

• Synthesize annotations using tags. Make sure that you and students add specific tags to your annotations such as by concept, topic, or comment type (e.g., “metaphor” “love” “resource” “follow-up”). This will allow you to search for this tag and quickly identify themes across annotations.
• Include multimedia in annotation by showing students how to add external images and videos in comments and replies. These can be immediately viewed in the comments window.
• Get ideas from the Hypothesis teacher community at Liquid Margins which meets regularly to discuss ideas for social annotation. All past recordings are available on YouTube.

• Discussion Board Alternative: Students benefit from conversations that take place within a text. This can keep their conversations specific and grounded. Students can post questions and then respond to other students’ questions OR you can place questions within the text for students to respond to.
• Comparative Activity: Students work to closely analyze a series of texts looking for commonalities, dissimilarities, or other points of importance for future discussion.
• Close Reading Practice: Students often fly through short complex texts too quickly. A Hypothesis activity can slow them down and encourage them to engage in slow, careful reading. Students may be tasked with adding definitions to unfamiliar words, grappling with passages that seem critical or patterns that stand out in the text, and linking to other texts or theories that a passage seems to allude to etc.
• Rhetorical Analysis: Students might be tasked with marking and explaining rhetorical strategies that they encounter in a text.
• Multimedia Writing: Students use Hypothesis to create a collaborative multimedia text by annotating a written text with images and video.
• Creative Writing Exercise: Students could respond creatively and collaboratively to a written text. It could also be used as an exercise (e.g. annotate “x” text in the voices of characters from a prior text).
• Syllabus Search: Students annotate for specific important course details such as due dates, course goals, and resources. This is a great beginning activity to build community and help students identify how your course relates to students’ personal and professional goals.
• Jigsaw Multiple Texts: Students are split into separate groups where each group reads a different text. After becoming “experts” on their assigned reading, they split into new groups with experts of other texts to teach each other about the text that they read.

• Brown, M. & Croft, B. (2020). “Social annotation an inclusive praxis for open pedagogy in the college classroom.” Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 1-8.
• Novak, E. et al. (2012). “The educational use of social annotation tools in higher education: A literature review.” The Internet and Higher Education, 15, 39-49.

Get Started

Hypothesis is fully integrated into Canvas. You’ll find it under Assignments and External Tools.

Here’s a great page designed to walk faculty through social annotation and using Hypothesis: https://web.hypothes.is/getting-started-with-canvas/

Hypothesis Tutorials

• How to set up and grade a Hypothesis Activity
• Quick 2-page overview

Additional Tutorials from Hypothesis (external links)

• How to set up Hypothesis readings through Canvas Assignments 
• How to set up Hypothesis readings through Canvas Modules 
• How to set up Hypothesis reading groups in Canvas 
• How to grade Hypothesis annotations in Canvas 

Ideas for How to Use Hypothesis

• Starter assignment ideas
• User-submitted assignment ideas
• NEW! AI Starter Assignments with ChatGPT

• Instructions for Students
• A student guide to Hypothesis in Canvas
• An Illustrated Guide to Annotation Types
• Annotation tips for students

• How to sync Hypothesis readings for imported Canvas courses