About Hypothesis

A closer look at the benefits of social annotation, creative assignment ideas
and more about the company behind Hypothesis

Why use social annotation?

• Active engagement: Students engage in meaningful activity as they read, reacting to each other and building knowledge together around their reading
• Greater understanding of the text: Close reading, annotation, and questioning help students make meaning from what they read
• Gaining insight from others’ annotations: Students learn more than they would on their own from reading their classmates’ thoughts about a text
• Makes reading visible: annotations and replies lay out an otherwise "hidden" activity
• Equalizing student voices: every student is able to add their ideas without possible in-class discussion constraints, like time or anxiety
• Reading is interactive: annotations can be text, images, links, or video
• Use for later reference: Annotations are recorded thoughts, and students can return to them whenever they need to

Creative ways to use Hypothesis

Hypothesis is most often used with assigned readings or texts in your class, but it can do a lot of other activity types. Here are some other interesting ways to use Hypothesis:

• Annotated syllabus: This can be a great way to get the students to thoroughly read the syllabus and to give students some experience  with Hypothesis and annotating for a lower-stakes task. Having students annotate and ask questions directly on the syllabus will also serve as an ongoing repository. Their comments and your answers will persist throughout the quarter so students can always look back and get answers
• Annotating transcripts: Have students annotate a transcript of a podcast they are assigned to listen to, or one of your pre-recorded lectures, a YouTube video, etc.
• Gallery walk: Compile a PDF of captioned images and have students use the captions to annotate their reactions and responses to the images
• Annotating slides: Post a PDF of your lecture slides and ask students to annotate them before, during, or after the lecture, depending on your goal (before: to gather questions that you can answer during the lecture; during: to provide a backchannel for discussion; after: to identify areas that are still unclear)

More about Hypothesis (the software and team)

Hypothesis is open source software and based on the annotation standards for digital documents developed by the W3C Web Annotation Working Group. As a company, Hypothesis partners broadly with developers, publishers, academic institutions, researchers, and individuals to develop a platform for the next generation of read-write web applications.

  Hypothesis is the tool - Hypothes.is is the website.

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About Hypothesis · TRY OUT HYPOTHESIS · Setting up Hypothesis in Canvas ·
Guidelines and Sample Instructions · What's New + FAQ · Additional Support + Resources