Everything You Can Do with the Hypothesis LMS App (as of October 2026)

Hi everyone! This post is a companion piece to our 2026 October 21 webinar, where we’re trying to show you just about every feature in the Hypothesis LMS app. That webinar is going to move fast, so this article is a place where you can relax, walk through things slowly, and follow links to our Help articles.

Note: If you’re reading this article after October of 2026, we might have added a few new features. You can find new features in the Hypothesis LMS App Change Log.

There’s a lot you can do in the LMS app, maybe more than you knew was possible. To that end, I’ve grouped everything by what you’re actually trying to do: write notes, find your way around them, build an assignment, pick what students will read or watch, and see how students did. This blog post tries to order things logically for a reader, and if you’re watching the webinar (or a recording) you might notice that some parts of this post are in a different order than the live presentation. Search is your friend in this article!

Taking notes

Everything starts with a note of some kind. Over text, there are four kinds of notes you can make. As you read below, please note that while we cover making annotations using your mouse, you can make them using your keyboard as well. Annotation creation is only a small portion of our customizable keyboard shortcuts. When you read about our shortcuts, note that the dialog lists them all, and you can change any shortcut, turn one off, or reset everything back to the defaults as you like.

The four kinds of notes

Our introduction to the LMS app for students covers all four of these, share it with your class!

• Annotations. Select some text and a small menu (we call it the adder) pops up with two buttons: Annotate and Highlight. Annotate opens a Card where you write your note, then you post it.
• Highlights. Click Highlight instead, and it saves right away, no posting needed. Highlights are always private; you can tell by the lock icon on the Card.
• Page notes. These work like annotations but aren’t tied to a particular passage or section of the document you’re annotating. Use them for comments on the whole document, instructions for students, or anything else that isn’t about one particular sentence.
• Replies. Anyone can reply to an annotation or a page note, and the reply lives on the same Card, so the whole conversation stays together.

Annotating images

Text isn’t the only thing you can annotate. The rectangle tool selects an area of an image, and the pin marks a single spot. Each one gets its own Card. Instead of quoted text, the Card shows a thumbnail of what you selected (a pin shows up as a dot), plus a description field. Descriptions help readers who won’t see the thumbnail, they come along when you export your notes, and they show how you’re thinking about that part of the image. There’s even a link to tips on writing good alt text right in the Card. We walk you through all of this in the article Image annotation in the Hypothesis LMS app.

What goes in a note

When you annotate over text, at the top of every annotation Card is the text you selected. It’s worth teaching students that choosing that text carefully is part of revealing their thinking to other readers. Below the selected text is the comment box, with buttons that allow you to format the text (Bold, Lists, etc). We point to these options in our Annotation basics article.

• Links and images. Add a link with the link button, or embed an image by pasting its web address. Add a short text description for anyone who can’t see the image. See Adding links and images to your annotations.
• Video and audio. Paste a YouTube or Vimeo link (for a video that allows embedding) and it becomes a playable video inside an annotation Card. A link to an MP3 becomes an audio player. See Adding videos to your annotations.
• Math. Write equations with LaTeX. See Formatting annotations with LaTeX.
• Markdown. The formatting buttons write Markdown for you, but you can type it yourself for extra options like headings, strikethrough and horizontal lines. The question-mark button next to the comment box opens a quick guide, and the Preview button shows you exactly what everyone else will see before you post. See our guide to formatting annotations with Markdown.
• @mentions. Type @ and start a name, and Hypothesis suggests people in your group (your course, or a smaller group within it). Mentioned students and instructors get an email. Learn how @mentions work here.
• Tags. Type a tag and press Enter, and it becomes a chip you can remove. Tags can have spaces, and Hypothesis suggests tags as you type. A good habit for students is to tag notes by what they’re doing, like citing background or asking a question. See the tags section of our student introduction.

Posting, privacy and drafts

Everything except highlights needs to be posted, and you can’t post an empty note. The Post button has a dropdown on it: post to your course group, or to Only Me. Only Me notes get the same lock icon as Highlights, and nobody in the course can see them except their author. That potentially makes Only Me a handy way to draft: post privately so your work is saved, come back and edit, then post to the course when it’s ready. See our article on creating a private annotation.

You can edit or delete your own notes with the pencil and trash can icons, and Cancel throws away a note you haven’t posted.

Reading and finding notes

Once a reading fills up with notes, the next question is how to read them all without getting lost. That’s where the Sidebar comes in.

The Sidebar

Our Annotation basics article covers the parts of the Sidebar you’ll use most.

• Collapse, expand and resize. Close the Sidebar for a read-through without it in the way, or drag its edge to make it wider for long responses.
• Show or hide highlights. The eye icon turns highlights on the page off and on. For a first read, students can close the Sidebar and hide highlights, then bring both back when they’re ready for the conversation.
• Annotations and Page Notes tabs. Each kind of note has its own tab, with a count.
• Updated annotations. When someone posts or edits while you’re reading, a button lets you load the changes and scrolls you right to them.

Cards and conversations

Every Card shows the note’s author, when it was posted (hover on the date for the full date and time), the quoted text, the author’s comments, and the tags. If someone edits their note, you’ll see an “edited” label with its own timestamp on hover. Conversations can branch, with replies to replies and new side conversations, and you can collapse any part of a thread to focus on what you’re reading. Once again, see our Annotation basics article.

Image annotation Cards have the same parts, except the thumbnail and image description sit where the quoted text would be. On the image itself, rectangles show up as yellow boxes and pins as yellow circles (here’s that image annotation article again). And on some PDFs and ebooks, Cards will display a page number from the document.

When the text changes underneath a note

Web pages and some other documents can change. If the text an annotation was attached to disappears, the annotation isn’t lost: it moves to an Unanchored tab, with its own count. The same thing happens to Replies if the person who started the conversation deletes their annotation, because we don’t want to lose them or hide them from you. And if a Reply in the middle of a conversation is deleted or made private, you’ll see “Message not available” in its place, so the rest of the thread still makes sense. See our examples in our Unanchored annotations article.

Moving between the page and the Sidebar

The page and the Sidebar are connected. Click a highlight on the page and the Sidebar filters to that Card. Where highlights overlap, you get all of them. Click a Card and the page scrolls to its highlight, and hover over a Card to turn its highlight blue so you can spot it. This all works on image annotations as well.

The Bucket bar sits along the edge of the Sidebar, and it shows where annotations are on the page, including how many are above and below the current document view. Click a bucket to filter the Sidebar to just those annotations, or click the arrows at the top or bottom to jump to the next set.

Search and sort

Search, under the magnifying glass icon, looks for your search terms in author names, quoted text, annotation text, and tags. Narrow it to a single tag with “tag:” or to one person with “user:”. When the Sidebar is filtered, you can still bring back individual annotations in a conversation one at a time. How Hypothesis search works has all the details.

You can sort Cards by newest, oldest, or location in the document, which is the default (see “Other functions” here).

Notebook

Notebook shows every annotation in a particular Hypothesis group across all of your documents in a course. You can filter by person, and each Card shows which document it came from. You can reply, edit, or delete notes in this view without opening the assignment. Students have access to Notebook too.
For now, Notebook works by group, not by course. To see a different group, return to the assignment, switch groups in the Sidebar, then open Notebook. See our Notebook instructions here.

Export and import

You can take your annotations out of Hypothesis. Export them as plain text or HTML for human readability; as a CSV for spreadsheets; or as a JSON file for a computer-friendly format. JSON files can also be imported back into Hypothesis, which comes in handy when you’re copying your scaffolding into a new course. Learn more about export and import here.

Help in the Sidebar

The help panel has getting-started steps, help topics, and a button that lets you open a support ticket. Opening a ticket from inside the app automatically includes some of the technical details our support team needs, so you don’t have to dig them up later.

Building assignments

Every Hypothesis reading starts as an assignment in your LMS. The steps for adding one differ a bit by LMS, so we made a centralized article on creating assignments in addition to our LMS-specific articles.

Choosing an assignment mode

The first thing we ask you to do in a new assignment is to choose a mode:

• Social Annotation is real-time engagement; everyone jumps right into the conversation right away.
• Paced Social Annotation is structured engagement. Students work on their own first, and the instructor can reveal everyone’s work when they’re ready.

Setting it up

Next you pick your assignment content, and then you’ll see a few more settings.

• In D2L and Moodle only: Title and Max Points. In these LMSs you’ll see title and Max Points fields, which overrides settings in your LMS. It’s optional in Moodle, but important to set in D2L where the LMS defaults aren’t very helpful.
• Group assignments. Use the groups you’ve set up inside your LMS. Make your Group Sets there first, then pick one to use inside Hypothesis. Students see annotations made in their group only, and instructors can switch between groups from the groups menu at the top of the Sidebar.
• Automatic participation grading. Hypothesis calculates a grade from how many annotations and replies each student writes. The instructor has a few settings at their disposal to best capture their grading intent, detailed in this article.

Paced Social Annotation

In a Paced Social Annotation assignment, students start in a hidden phase where they work on their own, and only the instructor can see their work. Later, the instructor can move the assignment to a revealed phase, and everyone can see and reply to each other’s notes. See our notes on Paced Social Annotation here.

• The Checkpoint. This is the moment notes are revealed. For now it’s a manual reveal.
• The Top bar. In the assignment you’ll see the Checkpoint, the Due Date if there is one, and a “Reveal annotations” button.
• Replying before the reveal. The instructor can view and reply to students’ notes during the hidden phase. Other students won’t see your replies until you reveal.
• Never revealing. Revealing is optional. If you never reveal, you have a private, one-on-one annotation assignment between you and each student.

Auto grading has an extra option for Paced Social Annotation assignments. There’s a Single grade option that works exactly like Social Annotation, counting notes over the whole assignment. There’s also a Paced grades option that counts the annotations created in the hidden and revealed phases separately, with each phase having its own targets, so you could (for example) require annotations before the reveal and replies after. Paced grades also has an optional Due Date, after which we stop counting new notes made in the assignment. Details on these extraction options are in our article Auto grading for Paced Social Annotation assignments.

What students can read and watch

When you create an assignment, you choose the content from a picker. Which options you see depends on your LMS and what your school has enabled. The per-LMS guides in Creating Hypothesis-enabled readings in an LMS walk through the document picker step by step.

• Web pages and PDFs. Any publicly available URL works, whether it’s a web page or a PDF on the web.
• PDFs from your LMS files area. Pick a PDF you’ve already uploaded to your course.
• PDFs from Google Drive or OneDrive. Pick a PDF from your own drive, or from your school account.
• Canvas and Moodle: Pages built in your LMS. HTML Pages you’ve built in your course can be annotated as well.
• JSTOR. If your school has an agreement with JSTOR, you can use the most current version of an article straight from JSTOR.
• VitalSource ebooks and textbooks. Assign a chapter right from the book’s table of contents.

Students can annotate video transcripts, too, while watching the video.

• YouTube. Use a public YouTube link.
• Canvas: Canvas Studio. You can use video or audio stored in Canvas Studio.

When using video in an LMS app assignment, the transcript scrolls along as the video plays, though you can turn auto-scroll off. You can search the transcript, play and pause from the transcript pane, and click a line to jump the video to that moment. Click an annotation, and the transcript scrolls to its highlight while the video pauses. The articles linked above cover all of these controls.

Seeing student progress, and reusing your work

This last section covers what happens after students start annotating: checking on activity, grading, staying in the loop, and carrying your work into next term.

The Reporting Dashboard

The Dashboard isn’t just for grading. It’s the quickest way to see who’s participating, whether or not you grade annotations at all. Everything below is in the Hypothesis LMS Reporting Dashboards.

• Opening the Dashboard. Open the Dashboard from the account menu inside any assignment, and you land on that assignment’s dashboard view. Once you’ve opened the dashboard, you can bookmark it and come straight back later without having to open an assignment first. If you’re ever logged out, just open it again from inside an assignment.
• Three views. The assignment view shows each student’s annotations, replies and last activity. Breadcrumbs at the top can take you up to the course view and the “All courses” view.
• Filters and sorting. Filter by assignment, section or group, or student, and pick more than one at a time. Sort any column, and set up the filters you want and bookmark the page so you have a saved view, like a weekly check-in.
• Rosters. When we can get a roster from your LMS, we use it to show student names, and we show when it was last updated. When we can’t, we build the list from students who’ve opened Hypothesis in that course. Group assignments show students by section or group.

Grades

When automatic participation grading is on, the Dashboard gets a color-coded, sortable grade column. Hover over any grade to see exactly how we calculated it.

• Syncing to your gradebook. A NEW badge means a grade hasn’t gone to your gradebook yet, or has changed since your last sync. Click the Sync button and only the NEW grades go. The Dashboard shows when you last synced grades.
• Paced grades. Paced Social Annotation assignments with Paced grades get extra columns: the hidden phase, the revealed phase, and a final grade that averages the two. Hover the final grade to see the breakdown.

You can also grade by hand, one student at a time, and give feedback as you go:

• Canvas SpeedGrader. Hypothesis integrates with SpeedGrader, allowing you to add grades and grading comments. The Sidebar filters to the student you’re grading, and you can turn the filter off to see the whole conversation.
• All other LMSs: The Grading Bar. In Blackboard, D2L Brightspace, Moodle, and others, a grading bar sits across the top of the assignment when you’ve enabled grading in your LMS. Pick a student from the dropdown or step through the list, enter a grade, add a comment, and submit. The Sidebar filters to that student’s notes, and the list shows students who’ve opened the assignment.

Emails

• Instructor email digest. A summary of what’s happened in your courses since the last digest, with no overlap. Choose how often it’s sent to you on your email notifications page.
• At-mention emails. When someone @mentions you in an LMS assignment, you get a notification email. Instructors and students can turn these off on the same notifications page.

Course copy and carrying your notes forward

Hypothesis works with course copy in your LMS, so copied assignments work in your new course with as few setup steps as possible. That covers assignments, sections, groups, files and pages, though every LMS handles it a little differently.

Course copy brings your assignments over, but not the annotations. If you’ve created scaffolding you’d like to reuse, export your notes as a JSON file from last term’s assignments and import them into the new ones.

That’s (almost) everything!

If you made it this far, thank you! I hope you found one or two features you didn’t know about that’ll make your next assignment a little better.

If you have any questions, or there’s a feature you wish we had, please send us a message. We read all of it, and as I wrote about recently, your feedback really does shape what we build next.

Happy annotating!

Michael DiRoberts
Head of Product, Hypothesis