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Appalachian State has recently signed onto a pilot project with Hypothesis that will run through fall 2020. Depending on faculty feedback, the product may be adopted after the fall 2020 term.

Hypothesis allows for collaborative annotation down to the sentence level on online documents such as websites , PDFs hosted on websites, or scholarly databases. Students can label their annotations with tags and reply to each other’s annotations. Annotations can be public, private, or shared with members of a group, such as among class members.Here are some links to help you get started.or PDFs. Students can create annotations and reply to others.

Steps for Adding a Hypothesis Activity

1. Go to the AsULearn site where you have a Teacher role, and turn editing on.
2. Click Add or an Activity or Resource.
3. Select External Tool, and under Preconfigured Tool, Select Hypothesis.
4. Under the Grade section, select the desired points or make it an ungraded item.
5. Click Save and Return to Course.
6. Click the activity you just created.
7. In the next step, select to enter a URL or Upload a PDF.
8. Once the resource (URL or PDF) is input, then the teacher can select text, click to Annotate, and make reading prompts for students. Some faculty may elect not to enter prompts for students.
9. When students login to the activity, then can reply to the teacher prompts, make their own unique annotations, reply to classmates' annotations, or simply highlight text.

Small Groups and Hypothesis

Hypothesis does not recognize groups within AsULearn, so there is not a setting built in to select separate or visible groups. To limit access to a Hypothesis activity to a particular group of participants, Hypothesis suggests two steps.

1. First, create a unique PDF for each small group.
   It is possible to create a PDF, apply a different fingerprint to that PDF, and then use the unique PDFs for each of the activities. Without unique fingerprints, all participants in the site will see the annotations of peers.
   Hypothesis Help Page for Creating PDFs with unique fingerprints. - Link
2. Use the Restrict Access setting to limit which participants can access it.

Resources

• How to set up Hypothesis readings through Moodle (AsULearn)
• How to grade Hypothesis annotations in Moodle (AsULearn)
• Student Guide to Hypothesis

Short Video about Hypothesis in AsULearn (includes student view of activity)

1-hour presentation by Hypothesis rep to CAE:

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