Hypothesis is an open-source software that allows for collaborative annotation down to the sentence level 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 and reply to each other’s annotations. Annotations can be public, private, or shared with members of a group, such as among class members.
With the Hypothesis-Canvas Integration, a private annotation group is created for your course, and instructors can create Canvas Module Items or Assignments with Hypothesis enabled. In both cases, students can start annotating right away with no need to join a group, log in to Hypothesis, or switch the group scope selector. With Assignments, instructors can use Canvas SpeedGrader to assess students’ annotations. When used properly, Hypothesis can help make reading visible, active, and social.
Consider checking out Academic Technology Solutions' blog posts on effective use of annotation or Hypothesis' resources page with a repository of activities shared by educators.
Have students focus less on the annotation but more on discussion. In other words, the annotation exercise should be treated as a way to jumpstart class discussions.
Make it part of the requirements for students to reply to each other’s annotations. Focus on making the text a resource for the learning community—in annotating, students are participating in a discourse, jointly constructing knowledge, and contributing to their learning community.
Hypothesis allows students to see each other's annotations almost in real time (although, a red circle with a down arrow may appear in the top right corner if there are new comments available to download). Slower readers or students who come to the readings after others have already started can focus on how to contribute to an ongoing discussion.
For difficult readings, consider scaffolding the reading and having students annotate for different things in different reading passes. For example, the first pass may be for reading for comprehension; the second pass may be for reading for analysis where students deconstruct the author’s argument; the third pass may be for reading for criticism of the author’s argument; and the fourth pass may be for reading for intertextuality where students tie the current reading to other texts. You can have students use agreed upon Tags to help categorize the annotation under specific reading passes.
If your class size is relatively big, you can prevent students from getting overwhelmed by the amount of annotation by dividing them into groups. If you are using the Hypothesis-Canvas integration, you can simply use the Canvas Groups feature to create separate reading groups.
If you are annotating with our class outside of Canvas, you will need to create separate Hypothesis exercises, each with its own clean copy of the reading, for each group. See “How to save copy of a PDF with a different fingerprint” for how to create clean copies of a PDF for annotation.
Alternatively, you can have each student group be responsible for annotating different sections of a reading, or have them use Tags to annotate the reading from different perspectives.
You can use Hypothesis for close reading discussion during class meetings. Divide students into groups and have them discuss the text and share the results of their discussion through annotation.
You can use Hypothesis with any text-based documents online. This includes:
There are a few requirements for using PDFs successfully.
You must use PDFs that allow users to select their text down to the individual character level. Normally this is not an issue for PDFs created directly from word processing documents, such as journal articles distributed by scholarly databases. If your PDFs are obtained from scanning or photocopying, you will need to run them through an optical character recognition (OCR) program (e.g., Hypothesis' free service DocDrop or Adobe Acrobat Pro) so that the texts appear as selectable text, rather than as images. See "How to OCR PDFs" for more information.
Tip: To test this quickly, simply open your PDF then try to select and copy the text into a separate document. If you can copy the text, then your PDF is annotation ready.
If you are creating your own PDFs from scanning or photocopying, be sure the images you take of the pages are clear, clean, free of blobs, bleed-throughs, and shadows as much as possible; otherwise, it could make the OCR process difficult. If your source content is from a book, you should scan the content one page at a time and not the entire page spread that includes the left and right pages. In other words, you should create PDFs that show one page of content at a time. This will greatly facilitate annotation for users who are reading on a small monitor.
Large PDFs with a lot of annotations will load slowly. There are two things you can do to reduce load time:
If you are using Hypothesis as a tool outside of Canvas to annotate professionally produced PDFs by journals, publishers, and the like, you might see others' public Hypothesis annotations. This is because each PDF has a unique identifier. This fingerprint allows for collaborative annotation of PDFs in different locations and even locally. (See Jon Udell’s explanation for synchronizing annotations.) If you are worried about multiple classes annotating the same text over time, then simply use the Hypothesis Groups feature.
Note: The Hypothesis-Canvas Integration will automatically create one group per Canvas course site. If you use Hypothesis through Canvas, you will not see public annotations.
Chrome is the optimal browser for using Hypothesis and you will need to install the Hypothesis Chrome extension. For installation directions, see Installing the Chrome Extension. If you use Firefox or Safari, you will need to install the Hypothesis bookmarklet.
To use Hypothesis on a mobile device, follow these instructions on How to Use Hypothesis on Mobile Devices.
There are two ways to use the Hypothesis-Canvas Integration:
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. 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 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 on how to review student annotations in Canvas SpeedGrader.
If you just want to provide Hypothesis as an engagement option for students for readings, you can load Hypothesis with any online documents in Modules. Follow the steps outlined in Hypothesis LMS App with Modules in Canvas. Always, be sure to select the Load This Tool In A New Tab option to allow for maximum screen space.
Below are the basic instructions for using Hypothesis in Canvas.
For more information, see Introduction to the Hypothesis LMS App for Students.