How do you use Hypothesis in your teaching?

I am currently using the tool in my Intro to Psychology class, which has around 60 students. In the same class last semester, students created over 2,100 annotations about the course readings and content. In that semester and in past semesters I seem to always hear excellent direct feedback from students – they loved using the tool and mentioned how it helped increase collaboration among peers, especially outside of the classroom. It also helped provide a sense of community, which can be hard to foster in online learning but that Hypothesis can certainly help with!

What has been the biggest benefit of using Hypothesis?

In higher education today, faculty are asked to do more and more, and we only have so many hours in the day. Tools like Hypothesis can help us to build that community and learning environment for students without the burden of excessive work on the instructors’ part. I think there’s some really cool potential to use it in all sorts of disciplines too – we’ve used it for readings but it’s not limited to that!

If you could sum up your experience with Hypothesis in a few sentences, what would it be?

It has been a very useful tool to build engagement and community in my classes. Hypothesis brings the readings to life and lets students have a dialogue about what they’re learning rather than working alone, listening to me talk, or only having small discussions in the classroom.

What has the student response to social annotation been?

A broad narrative I have heard from students is that they have really enjoyed Hypothesis. They have found it as a helpful way to interact with their peers and make reading a lot more fun than what it can otherwise be. Whenever students mention it in evals or surveys it’s always been positive.

I honestly did not expect students to like it as much as they do. At first I thought it was a great tool, but it was hard to gauge what students were getting out of it week-to-week. At the end of the semester I just asked what they thought and consistently students were saying that it was so much easier to navigate their readings using Hypothesis instead of opening a textbook and reading by themselves.