Hypothesis is a social annotation tool integrated in Canvas, which allows students to make comments directly on online documents such as websites, PDFs, pages on your Canvas site, or YouTube videos (if they have a transcript). Students can label their annotations with tags, reply to each other’s annotations, and @ mention each other at any relevant point in the text. Annotations can be public, private, or shared with members of a group, such as among class members.
Instructors who create annotation activities as assignments in Canvas can add grades to the Canvas Gradebook for participating in these activities.
While Canvas allows instructors to create Hypothesis activities in both the Modules and Assignment section, the advantage of creating a Hypothesis Canvas Assignment is that you can use Canvas’ SpeedGrader to review all the annotations made by each student in a given document. Furthermore, Canvas Assignments allow you to provide instructions in a text box on the landing page, so that students have context before the activity appears.
If you decide to provide a grade for students’ work, we recommend that you make this a low-stakes assignment, perhaps by Displaying Grade as complete/incomplete. If you do not want to provide a grade but still want to use the SpeedGrader feature, you can check the Do not count this assignment towards the final grade box in the assignment settings or put the assignment in an Assignment Group that counts for zero weight in the final grade.
Follow these instructions on Using the Hypothesis LMS App with Assignments in Canvas to create your Hypothesis Canvas Assignment. Always be sure to select the Load This Tool In A New Tab option to allow for maximum screen space.
Follow these instructions on Grading Student Annotations in Canvas to learn how to review student annotations in Canvas SpeedGrader.
After clicking the +Assignment button and filling in basic information including the Title field and adding instructions to the Description field, instructors will find several sets of options related to grading.
When setting up a Hypothesis assignment in Canvas, instructors have access to the standard set of options for creating assignments:
After students have finished participating in the collaborative annotation assignment, instructors can also provide private individual feedback to students by opening the assignment and clicking the Speedgrader button in the top right corner of the screen.
Using a dropdown menu in the top right of Speedgrader, you can select which student’s work you’d like to view. This will allow you to:
The automatic participation score feature provides instructors provisional scores they can review and transfer to their Canvas gradebook. These scores are based on the instructor’s required number of annotations and/or replies to classmates, as well as other factors determined by the instructor during assignment setup.
You can access Auto Grading after selecting the reading you’d like your students to annotate. In the Submission Type dropdown menu, select “External Tool,” click the checkbox titled “Load this Tool in New Tab,” and then click Find. Click Hypothesis and select the reading you’d like to add to the assignment.
Once you’ve selected the reading for your assignment, click the checkbox titled “Enable automatic participation grading.” You will have several options to configure your grading scheme.
Grading type:
Activity Calculation:
Goals:
The tentative scores based on your Autograding selections, as well as other high-level information about participation in assignments, are available for instructor review in the new LMS reporting dashboard. For instructors who use Hypothesis multiple times throughout the quarter, the dashboard also allows instructors to view annotation and reply counts for specific readings or for a particular student.