Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about the Hypothesis Social Annotation Tool

This article provides instructors with answers to frequently asked questions about the Hypothesis annotation tool.

• Have students ask each other questions, share ideas, and collaborate around their learning.
• Invite students to annotate the syllabus.
• Make readings annotation-enabled to create an optional space for students to connect with each other.
• Guide students through the reading with instructor annotations.
• Use Hypothesis for seminar-style discussion online.
• Recommend that students annotate the lecture notes.

• CETL is happy to help you setup and use Hypothesis in your course
• Please review the CETL schedule for upcoming Hypothesis workshops
• UWM's Hypothesis support engineer is available at: support@hypothesis
• Liquid Margins is a podcast-like show on Fridays, which talks about how to use the Hypothesis tools.

• This tutorial will help an instructor create a Hypothesis-enabled Assignment in Canvas.
• Once the Hypothesis-enabled Assignment is created, be sure to add the assignment to the appropriate Canvas module on the Home page. This tutorial describes adding an Assignment to Modules.
• You can’t add multiple PDFs to a Hypothesis-enabled assignment. You can only have one reading per assignment.

• At the beginning of semester, have students annotate the syllabus. What do they already now? What questions do they have? What are they excited to learn? 
• Have students annotate early readings on building community, self-care, or being an online learner.
• Be sure to communicate the advantages of using Hypothesis.is to your students (e.g. annotation makes reading visible, and makes reading social).

• If a student annotates and posts to themselves and not the course, the Teacher cannot see the annotations. You’ll need to let your students know this information.
• From within Hypothes.is, the eye icon turns on and off the highlights. It’s a good idea to tell your students to read the document without the highlights and annotations first. After the first read, students can go back and re-read adding annotations and highlights as assigned.
• When using Hypothes.is in a synchronous way, tells students that new annotations are shown as a red circle and you can select this to see the annotations that have occurred since you last posted.

• Groups can be any size (e.g. between 5-105 students). In general, group size for Hypothesis follows similar recommendations for discussion group size. In-depth, threaded conversations should have smaller groups, ideally between 5-10 students. Groups smaller than 5 may suffer from a lack of new ideas and groups larger than 20 may become too overwhelming to follow. In comparison, if you want students to add questions/comments without replying to peers, groups can be larger.
• Digital fingerprints is the Hypothes.is recommended way to setup groups. Here’s more information on digital fingerprints.

• Images that are included in posts must “live” on a website. The image has to be publicly available on the web to add to the annotation post. Images can’t be uploaded to Hypothesis. 
• Once you find an image on the web, right click and select “Copy Image Address” and then paste this address into the image icon in the text editor within a post. Here’s a tutorial from Hypothesis on adding images to posts.
• Google Arts and Culture can be used to annotate images.
• If there’s an image included in a document, you can add annotations to text around an image, but not on the image itself.