When to Use?
Hypothesis is a powerful social annotation tool that can be used to make student reading visible, active, and social in your Blackboard Ultra course. It provides instructors with the ability to support student success by placing active discussions right on top of their course readings, allowing both instructors and students to add comments and start conversations in the margins of a document or website.
Whitt Kilburn, Professor of Political Science at GVSU explains how Hypothesis has transformed his student's reading.
Follow the steps below to add Hypothesis enabled readings to your Blackboard Ultra course.
Procedure
1. Create a new course content item.
A. From the Course Content page, click on the plus (+) icon to show the Create Content menu. Select Content Market.
B. Under Institution Tools locate Hypothesis and click the plus (+) icon in the lower right corner. Note: Do not click anywhere else on the Hypothesis panel but the small plus icon.
C. A Hypothesis content item should now be visible on the Course Content page. Click the 3 dots on the right side of the Hypothesis item and select Edit.
D. Change the name of the Hypothesis assignment to something appropriate. Check the box to Create gradebook entry for this item if desired and set the grading options.
E. Click Save when finished.
2. Configure your Hypothesis Assignment
A. Click on the newly created content item to finish configuring your Hypothesis assignment. In the Assignment details window, you will have the option to select a publicly viewable URL, a PDF from your Blackboard course’s content collection, a PDF from Google Drive or OneDrive, a JSTOR article or GVSU Save/VitalSource eBook.
NOTE: PDFs must have optically recognizable text in order to be annotatable in Hypothesis. If you can select text in the PDF, no further action is needed. If you can’t select text in the PDF, then you’ll need to convert the PDF to a machine-readable (OCR) format.
B. Complete the setup for the selected assignment source. To learn more about these options visit the Hypothesis Help Topics website or contact your eLearning Liaison.
C. By default, your Hypothesis assignment will make all annotations visible to every student in the course. To designate the reading as a group assignment, click the Group assignment checkbox and select an existing group set from the drop-down list and click Continue.
3. Preview your Hypothesis Assignment
A. The assignment should now open with the Hypothesis sidebar loaded. You and your students will be able to select text and annotate.
