Hypothesis: Getting Started with Annotation Assignments in Canvas

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This article provides a brief overview for getting started with the Hypothesis integration in Canvas to enable annotation activities. Collaborative annotation assignments engage students in course readings and provides instructors with a view into how students are reading.

Getting Started

Hypothesis is integrated in Canvas as an external tool so it is available in all course sites. To use Hypothesis in Canvas, you can either:

  1. create an assignment in Canvas and select Hypothesis as the External Tool or
  2. enable Hypothesis for non-graded web and PDF annotation activities as an “external tool” within a module

Hypothesis guides:

Any PDF readings that you assign to students to be read using Hypothesis must be in a machine-readable format. If you open your PDF and you can select a line of text and copy and paste it elsewhere, your PDF is good to go. If not, use the web based converter (linked below) or other PDF editing tools including the Adobe Acrobat DC software (free to Middlebury instructors and students).

Adobe guides:

Hypothesis doesn’t use the file name to differentiate PDFs. Instead, a unique digital ‘fingerprint’ in the document meta data is used to ensure that annotations are correctly associated with a file. In some cases, instructors may have a large PDF that they want to chunk into shorter reading tasks. Hypothesis advises instructors to use Adobe Acrobat to ‘split’ a larger file into shorter PDFs with their own unique fingerprint. Not doing so, could result in annotations on one file appearing on another that has the same parent fingerprint.

Teaching and Learning with Hypothesis in Canvas

For Instructors

For Students

Need help?

For technical support, submit a ticket with Hypothesis. For pedagogical support for Hypothesis in Canvas, schedule a consultation with a DLINQ team member.

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Related Services / Offerings (2)

Canvas is Middlebury's main learning management system. It provides tools to create online course sites that enable course communications, forums, assessments, file sharing, and other activities.
The Hypothesis integration with Canvas brings discussion directly to course content by enabling students and teachers to add comments and start conversations in the margins of texts.