Hypothes.is: Faculty Use Cases

Linguistics

Professor Marissa Fond asks students to use Hypothes.is to annotate assigned reading. The process is similar to annotating by hand—highlighting, taking notes—but with everyone participating. Students may see what their classmates are thinking about, focusing on, wondering, etc. and consider commenting on each others' notes.

Fond requires students to complete a certain number of annotations during the course of the semester to receive full credit, and they must complete each reading's annotation by its deadline (to avoid students flying through a dozen annotations right at the end of the semester). There are more opportunities for annotations than required annotations, to make the assignment flexible and feasible.

After the deadline passes, Fond reads the annotations and answers all questions. She also provides gentle corrections if a student has appeared to misunderstand a point, and occasionally makes comments on annotations (e.g., "these are the beginnings of some productive research questions that would expand on this work").

Fond grades the annotations as "complete" or "incomplete." She does not evaluate them or give partial credit. She will, however, get in touch with a student if they don't seem to be engaging with Hypothes.is at all, or if their comments are only vacuous (e.g., "This is interesting"), but this rarely happens.

Prof. Fond makes use of the tagging feature in Hypothesis. Type in the tag in the provided space and press enter. Some tags to use are:

• key takeaway = you consider this an important point made by the researcher(s)
• definition = if a key term or concept is defined, it can be helpful to flag it
• question = in your annotation you wrote a question for the class/instructor
• why this matters = you have an opinion about what the overall point is, or how you might apply these ideas in other areas of life

Note: Some older/scanned PDFs will not allow highlighting. You can OCR (optical content reader) these documents in Adobe Acrobat or try the OCR feature native to Hypothes.is. Also, you may try using the "page notes" option instead, and indicate what you're referring to as best you can (e.g., "on page 36, the researchers note that...").