Early release Paced Social Annotation Demo

This is a demo of our paste social annotation feature. I'm going to walk you through what it looks like as an instructor to create this new mode of assignment. We're going to show you what it looks like as an instructor and as students and how it behaves. So, here we go. I'm in Canvas, but it could be anywhere. I'm going to open Hypothesis. Now, usually at this point I would be asked to select a document in Hypothesis, but now instead instructors are going to get this screen. They're going to get two choices. The social annotation mode is our normal Hypothesis-enabled reading mode. It's the same thing they've been doing. Our new feature is the paste social annotation mode. This still uses all of our social annotation components. It just adds a few things to help instructors add structure to their assignments. We're going to click in here. The first thing we're asked to do is select a checkpoint type. Checkpoints are the point in the assignment when student annotations go from hidden to being revealed. We'll talk more about this in a little bit, but for now it's enough to know that a manual means you're going to get a button that the instructor has to click, and that will take student annotations and reveal them to the whole class. The due date is optional. It will allow instructors to tie some grading goals to a due date within our app. And now we have the normal document selection page. I'm going to make this one out of a URL. We still have the options here to enable automatic participation grading or turn this into an assignment that uses the LMS groups integration, which is what I'm going to use now. All right. Let's publish this and take a look at it as an instructor. Okay. So, we see the text on side, we see hypothesis on the other. This is normal, but what's new is this top bar. Top bar for instructor has three pieces. On the top left, we tell them what checkpoint they selected. In this case, it's manual. In the top middle, we show the due date they selected in our app if they selected one. And in the top right, there is a button that says reveal annotations. And that's what the instructor will click when they want to move the students from that hidden mode to the visual mode. I want to make an instructor annotation at this point. And now we're going to bring some students into this. Here is my student Alan Anderson. He's going to open up this assignment. And as I would expect, he sees the text, sees the hypothesis sidebar. He can see the instructor's annotation. He has a top bar as well. He gets two pieces of information. He knows that there's a checkpoint and that the annotations right now are in that hidden mode. So, when he annotates, his classmates won't see the annotations he creates. And then in the top right, he sees that this assignment has a due date that was set within our app. In the future, we'll also add an option for students where they can choose to opt into email notifications. So, if they want to get an email notification about when the checkpoint happened or an upcoming due date, we'll give them that option. For students on mobile, we're going to add a little button that'll let them fold that top bar up. Screen real estate is really important on mobile. We do want students to see the checkpoint and the due date. So, when they open assignment, it's going to start folded down so they get that information. I'll go over here. And maybe he'll reply to his instructor as well. It's a good start. Just to check back in as the instructor, I've got some updates here. Let's click on this. All right. See Alan's annotation, I can see his reply to my annotation. The instructor is going to reply to Alan here. What does Becky see in all this? Cuz there's a lot that's happened. So, here's my other student, Becky Britt, and she's going to launch this assignment. Becky gets the text. She gets the sidebar. She sees the instructor annotation. She gets the same checkpoint and due date information that Alan got, but that's all she sees. Let's add some notes from Becky. Yep. And this is her here. Becky's annotated. She's replied to the instructor. Alan's annotated, replied to the instructor. The instructor replied to Alan. That instructor annotation didn't show up. Let's go back to the instructor side. Two more updates, those are from Becky. So, here we go. The instructor is seeing their annotation, Alan's reply, Becky's reply. The instructor is seeing Alan's annotation and the instructor's reply, and then we're seeing Becky's annotation. Jumping back to Alan really quick, I want to make sure it's clear that as Alan, I can also see the fact the instructor replied to me even though Becky doesn't see this thread at all. And as Alan, I can see the instructor's question and my reply, but I don't see Becky's reply. All right, we're going to change all that now. Here we go. So, the instructor has said, "We're at a good place. Everyone's contributed their original thoughts. It's time for them to see what each other has written, reflect on it, get back in, maybe reply to each other." So, I'm going to click reveal annotations. This action cannot be undone. We want to be very clear about that. All right, nothing has changed on the instructor side cuz as an instructor, I could already see everything. You'll know that the button's gone and I now have a little reminder about when I clicked that button in case there's any confusion. Let's go in and see what's happening on Alan's side. By now, Alan has left the assignment. He's just waiting for it to start again. And a lot more information here. Checkpoint on the top left, annotations are visible, so I know the checkpoint has passed as a student. Here's my instructor's initial question, but I see my reply and Becky's. I see my annotation and my instructor's reply, but I don't see Becky's annotation. Oh, this is much more interesting than my annotation. I got to work harder as Alan. Let's see what Becky's up to. Becky also sees everything. She also can see in the top left that annotations are visible. She still has an upcoming assignment due date in the top right. She can see the instructor's question and now she can see Alan's reply. She can see her reply. She sees Alan's reply to her reply because we're in the revealed state now. So, everything Alan makes from now on, Becky will see instantly. It's only prior to the checkpoint that Alan's work was hidden from Becky. All right, I'm in as Becky. Here's Alan's annotation as expected. Crucially, here's the instructor's reply. So, that instructor reply was hidden earlier from Becky cuz it was a reply to Alan. So, Becky didn't get to see it. But, now that everything's revealed, the instructor's reply to Alan is also revealed to Becky. And then, here's Becky's annotation from before. All right. That is the core of the feature. I'm back in my instructor view here just so I can take it all in. Let's talk a little bit about the different ways you might use this feature. One, scaffolding. This is a new form of scaffolding you can do in Hypothesis. Both scaffolding social annotation itself and also potentially just scaffolding the more difficult concepts in your course. For students who are newer to social annotation, it can be a lot to think about to know that your notes, which you're used to being private or at best shown to an instructor, will be seen by the whole class. We've had a lot of requests for a one-on-one annotation mode where instructors can see all their students' annotations, but students can only see their own annotations and the instructor's, and they can't see other students. There's been workarounds to do that using LMS groups, but they usually requires a lot of work on the instructor's part. So, this feature makes that a lot easier. All the instructor has to do is never click that reveal annotations button. If they don't click the button, the assignment will permanently stay in that one-to-one mode, and they can see everything students do all together in the one group, but students are only going to see what they wrote. Students will also see if an instructor wrote a top-level annotation. The instructor can still leave notes for the whole class very easily this way. Students will see replies to their own annotation by the instructor, but they won't see the instructor's replies to other students. Great first step in shepherding students through the art of social annotation or just giving them feedback on a really difficult topic that you don't need to be socially annotated yet. The next step with scaffolding, when the instructor feels it's appropriate, is to hit that reveal button, probably letting students know, yes, your annotations are going to start as hidden, but eventually going to be seen by everyone. This can do a couple things for students. First of all, it gives them a chance to just post annotations, post their drafts, post their thoughts, any hypotheses, or can always go back to their own annotations and edit them. So, just getting the work out, reading the text, gives instructors a chance to see what everyone's work is, and guide the class a little bit before the class has seen each other's annotations. We want to help spur more original thinking from students. It can be tough to see other people annotating over a text and taking all the good bits before you got to annotate over the good bits yourself. And so, this is a great way to let students have free reign over the text and really promote their own original thinking, and not be too influenced by what everyone else is commenting on or what they've already thought. There's also a little bit of AI friction. Students won't be able to take the annotations of their peers, say, an hour before the homework deadline, grab them all, copy-paste them, put them in an LLM, and then say, "Write me some annotations that are vaguely like these, but a little different." This is also a way to scaffold good assignment habits. If you want students coming back to assignments more than once, rereading people's comments, rereading the text. If you tell students that you want them to make five annotations on the first three through, and then after the checkpoint, you want five replies to others, but you also want three new annotations at that point, students are prompted to read the text a second time. It could be hard enough to know the students have read the text once, actually help nudge them to read the text multiple times before you're going to meet and talk about it in class, that's potentially a huge win. This just provides that little bit of structure to help those students build better education habits. If you come up with another use case for this that has been really helpful in your classroom, please let us know. Uh love to share those stories amongst instructors and help out the whole community that way. While we're in the early release stage of this feature, you can go to our help center, web.hypothes.is/help, and search for early release paste social annotation, and you'll find this article, the early release paste social annotation article. I encourage you to come in here, read how to use it, we take you step-by-step through it, and we give you some instructions on how to give feedback on this feature. We would love to hear from you. We would love to know what you're thinking, and what you found useful, and what you didn't find useful, and where we could improve this. Thanks, hope to talk to you soon.