Hypothesis Partner Workshops

Hypothesis is a social annotation tool installed directly in your learning management system (LMS). Adding Hypothesis to readings in your course supports student success by placing active discussion right on top of readings, enabling students and teachers to add comments and start conversations in the margins of texts.

To learn more about making reading active, visible, and social using Hypothesis, please join us in one of our upcoming workshops. RSVP via one of the links below.

Can’t make a workshop time? Reach out to success@hypothes.is to schedule a workshop for your department or school!

Introductory workshops

Activating annotation with Hypothesis

The Hypothesis team will share how teachers are using annotation-powered reading to help students develop foundational academic skills like deep reading and persuasive writing. In addition to sharing pedagogical best practices for social annotation, we will demonstrate how Hypothesis is used with course readings in your LMS. Participants will gain a clear understanding of how to start incorporating social annotation into their courses to improve student outcomes. These sessions are great introductions to using Hypothesis and social annotation in your courses. (30 minutes)

All-level special topics workshops

Take a deeper dive into Hypothesis with our special topics workshops! These workshops are largely based on pedagogy and may not review how to use Hypothesis in your LMS. They are helpful for both new Hypothesis users who aren’t sure how to incorporate social annotation into their courses and experienced users looking for new ideas. (45 minutes each)

Special topics workshop descriptions

Leveraging social annotation in the age of AI

The emergence of cutting-edge technologies, like ChatGPT, has sparked a critical conversation throughout the education industry. In this workshop, the Hypothesis team will show you how to leverage social annotation to encourage authentic, process-oriented engagement with your course materials. Participants can expect to leave the webinar armed with concrete assignments to implement in your courses right away.

Annotate your syllabus

Asking your class to annotate the syllabus allows you to introduce students to social annotation in a low-stakes way. Even better, you’re providing them with an opportunity to engage with the syllabus, to share ideas, and to ask questions about the course in a way that sets the tone for engagement throughout the term. In this workshop, the Hypothesis team will review ideas and guidance for the collaborative syllabus annotation assignment.

Annotation starter assignments

This workshop is ideal for instructors who are interested in using social annotation in their courses but aren’t exactly sure how to provide guidance to students. The Hypothesis team will review ideas for annotation starter assignments and provide you with ready-to-use instructions for a variety of disciplines and modalities. It doesn’t matter if you’re teaching humanities, business, STEM, or the health professions, or if you’re teaching face-to-face or online — you’ll get strategies from this workshop that you can add immediately to an assignment in your course.

Hypothesis social annotation in large courses

Creating an active learning experience in large enrollment courses can be challenging. Incorporating Hypothesis social annotation into your large courses can promote greater learner engagement with course materials, which can lead to better comprehension, retention, and analysis of course content. In this workshop, the Hypothesis team will review strategies for structuring annotation assignments to best manage substantial student annotation activity. We’ll also suggest grading approaches for social annotation assignments to keep grading time to a minimum. Participants can expect to come away from this session with a clear idea about how they can expand their usage of collaborative annotation in their courses to improve student success.

Hypothesis and UDL: Multimedia features

Using multiple means of representation (text, images, and video) is a key principle of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and can help students better comprehend and retain essential course concepts. Hypothesis recently introduced YouTube video transcript annotation as a new feature as well as the ability to annotate articles directly from the JSTOR database. In addition, Hypothesis annotations can include links, images, text, and videos. Christie from the Hypothesis team will discuss multimodal learning as a core principle of UDL, and how using YouTube video annotation alongside text annotation with scholarly sources like JSTOR can help incorporate multimodal learning in your course. She’ll demonstrate how to set up YouTube videos & JSTOR annotation assignments with Hypothesis and review how to add multimedia to annotations.

Grading and feedback for social annotation

While there are multiple options for grading in Hypothesis, the importance of incentivizing participation cannot be overstated. To help spark interest in annotation, instructors need to provide clear guidelines that reward high-quality contributions. In this workshop, the Hypothesis team will present foundational components in creating either an analytic or holistic rubric for annotation, as well as establishing a framework for effective feedback. Social annotation lends the ideal format for assessing and promoting continuous learning, so join this session to gather ideas and tools to take your grading and feedback practices to the next level.

Social annotation to foster equity and belonging

The Hypothesis team will share how instructors can implement Hypothesis social annotation into their courses in order to increase equity and belonging amongst students. We’ll first broadly discuss pedagogical strategies for increasing equity and belonging in teaching and learning. Then, we’ll dive into specific strategies instructors can use with Hypothesis social annotation in their own courses. Participants can expect to come away from the workshop with concrete assignment ideas for using Hypothesis social annotation with equity and belonging in mind.

Creative ways to use social annotation in your courses

In this workshop, the Hypothesis team will lead participants through various discussion protocols and active-learning strategies that can help make social annotation even more engaging and fun. Participants will come away from this session with several strategies for creatively using social annotation in their courses.

Social annotation for STEM subjects

The Hypothesis team will discuss how collaborative annotation with Hypothesis can be used to make student reading visible, active, and social in STEM courses. Social annotation’s collaborative and metacognitive nature can encourage students to tackle difficult concepts in a new way. For example, social annotation can assist students in identifying patterns and relationships, in analyzing the validity of arguments and/or solutions, and in locating and contextualizing important information in problems. Additionally, it can give instructors an opportunity to guide students through texts or course materials asynchronously.

In addition to sharing pedagogical best practices for collaborative annotation, the Hypothesis team will demonstrate how Hypothesis can be used with course readings in your LMS. Participants can expect to come away from this session with a clear idea about how they can start incorporating collaborative annotation into their courses to improve student success.