For Chairs, Deans, and VP:
Over the last four years, Ernie Tsacalis and I have had both the joy and the honor to work with several fantastic faculty members from a variety of departments in the Fearless Learning QEP Research & Engagement Academy. Faculty worked alongside their peers to develop course assignments and lesson plans which encourage the integration of reading, writing, and research skills. We have identified one particular ed tech tool which significantly increased student engagement in all three of these areas: Hypothesis.
Five fearless faculty joined a Spring 2021 Pilot Program and successfully used this tool with their students this semester in both synchronous and asynchronous course sections.
QEP REA faculty who participated in the Pilot:
Jennyfur Bird-Ramirez - ENGL
Leonila Espinoza - ENGL
Elizabeth Mancha - EDUC 1300
Jennifer McIntyre - HIST
Amelia Serafine - HIST
Great! What is Hypothesis?
Quite simply, Hypothesis is a social annotation tool that allows students and faculty to make notes (annotations) directly ON a text such as an assigned reading, scholarly article, or even the course syllabus. This simple act of interacting on a text via annotations invites students into the scholarly conversation not only with the text but with other annotators - their peers and instructor.
By seeing each others annotations in context alongside the original author's words and ideas, students become more deeply engaged with the text as they make meaning for themselves and one another. In short...students actually read the text. And then they write on the text. Then they incorporate research from within the text or from other annotations, or provide links to external sources such as videos or library sources to give further insight into the discussion. Writing makes thinking visible even within something as small as an annotation.
The total rockstar faculty listed above reported significant gains in student engagement when it comes to reading and writing about assigned texts online. And by all accounts, students have also enjoyed annotating and reading via Hypothesis. Discussion boards cannot even begin to support this level of text engagement. A full report on their experiences is available under the Spring 2021 Pilot tab on this LibGuide along with faculty examples.
How does this technically work? Briefly stated?
Hypothesis is integrated into Canvas as an external tool for each course section and is connected to SpeedGrader for quick assessment and instructor feedback on the quality of student annotations. That's it. Instructors get a key code from Hypothesis and fire it up as an external tool in Canvas. Assign the reading, students go in, they annotate and engage with the text. Instructor also engages and guides discussion, then grades. Cool. Reading done. Making meaning and comprehension increases. Everyone is happier.
Sounds cool. So what are the next steps?
Hypothesis Spring Pilot cost us zero dollars. To continue using this tool in the Fall will require a subscription. Considering that this is a tool that directly positively impacts skills that students themselves have stated they need help with -- college level reading and writing -- I emphatically believe that this is too good of a deal to pass up.
For a minimum subscription price of $6800, Hypothesis will provide access to this tool for 10% of our FTE which I believe for Fall would be around 1700 individual users. 1700 students. For $6800. How many course sections would we be able to scale up to with a paid subscription? 56 sections at 30 students each? 68 sections at 25 students each? That's a lot of potential positive impact for courses which require reading, writing, and research.
Who could hit the ground running in Fall? The four cohorts of faculty who completed the Fearless Learning Research & Engagement Academy come immediately to mind. Annotation was a key high impact practice that Ernie and I introduced to them so they are already familiar with the pedagogical theory as explained in the Fearless Pedagogy tab on this LibGuide. Faculty who are using OER in their courses would also be thrilled to have their students annotating on their selected sources.
As a librarian who regularly looks at pricing for a wide variety of ed tech tools, I cannot emphasize enough what a fantastic deal this would be for our faculty and students. However, I am about to be off contract for the entire summer and would very much love for a coalition of faculty and chairs to make the case to secure funding for San Antonio College to subscribe to Hypothesis for faculty and their students in the Fall.
How can we contact Hypothesis to set up our subscription and complete the paperwork?
Our wonderful Hypothesis rep is Sonja Visser (sonja@hypothes.is). She is standing by with the contract for the 10% FTE-based subscription. The Spring Pilot MOU passed muster with District purchasing, so a lot of the information from that paperwork is already on file with District. This should not be a cold request requiring a lot of legwork.
In closing, let us try our best to carry this high impact practice forward into Fall 2021 to help students more deeply engage with their assigned readings and with one another.
Celita Avila
Co-Director, Fearless Learning QEP
Librarian
