UC Santa Cruz Harnesses Power of Hypothesis and JSTOR to Revolutionize Online Learning
SANTA CRUZ, CA, April 13, 2023 – The University of California, Santa Cruz has implemented Hypothesis, a leading social annotation tool, within its humanities department to foster deeper engagement with course content. The initiative leverages Hypothesis’s integration with JSTOR, unlocking access to JSTOR’s vast library of 12 million articles, books, and images directly within the Hypothesis interface.
The initiative, championed by Associate Professor of History Minghui Hu, aims to increase interactions and engagement among students, particularly those new to online learning. Recognizing the growing challenges of student distraction and declining attentiveness, especially amid the pandemic, Professor Hu sought a tool that not only facilitated interaction but also created a shared text in the classroom.
“Hypothesis stood out for its social aspect,” Hu states. “It’s very effective in getting students to talk to each other about the text, turning reading from a solitary experience to a social one.”
Hypothesis and JSTOR’s integration has encouraged students to engage more deeply with scholarly content. The tool has been used in four primary ways: term lookup, question posing, text summarization, and response to peers’ annotations. This process makes the complex scholarly content, typically designed for graduate students and scholars, more accessible to undergraduates.
About the University of California, Santa Cruz
The University of California, Santa Cruz is a globally recognized, public research university esteemed for its dedication to innovation and justice. With more than 19,000 students and 139 undergraduate and graduate programs, UC Santa Cruz continues to make significant academic and societal contributions. Its faculty and students’ achievements have garnered national and international recognition for the quality of their research and teaching.
About Hypothesis
Hypothesis is an advanced web annotation software solution that implements a real-time conversation layer over the entire web. It enables sentence-level note-taking or critique on top of a diverse array of texts, such as blogs, legislation, articles, and news — with users creating over 50 million annotations thus far.