Hypothesis Basics: Start Here

Hypothesis Basics: Start Here

Hypothesis is a collaborative annotation tool that makes reading active, visible, and social. With Hypothesis, students engage with their readings, instructors, ideas, and each other in deeper, more meaningful ways.

This guide will get you started using Hypothesis in Canvas. Begin here and then review Creating Hypothesis Assignments in Canvas

For information about Perusall and Hypothesis as teaching tools, please see Collaborative Annotation Tools: Hypothesis and Perusall.

This page links to UO Online how-to guides from UO Online. Links to the Hypothesis website are also provided. Questions and support requests should go to UO Online and Canvas Support; see contact information at the bottom of this page.

Related Topics: Canvas, Canvas Assignments

Getting Started with Hypothesis

Documents must be scanned to PDF using optical character recognition (OCR) for the PDF to be usable in Hypothesis. OCR enables the Hypothesis text selection tool. If the document is a scanned as an image to a PDF, the text selection tool won't work. 

To determine whether PDFs are images or have been scanned with OCR, or for steps to convert PDF images to OCR, please visit Creating Text-Based PDFs for Hypothesis and Perusall.

Create a New Hypothesis Assignment in Canvas

  1. Log into Canvas and navigate to the course where you want to use Hypothesis.
  2. Upload the PDF to be used in the Hypothesis assignment to Canvas; it can also be uploaded to a public website or to OneDrive.
  3. Create a new assignment using the external tool Hypothesis.

Creating Hypothesis assignments in Canvas is explained in Creating Hypothesis Assignments in Canvas. The Hypothesis blog post Hypothesis Annotation: Now in Microsoft OneDrive describes how annotations can be made on PDFs stored in Microsoft Sharepoint and OneDrive.

Using Groups in Hypothesis Assignments

Create a Canvas group before creating a Hypothesis assignment.

For more information about groups and Hypothesis, review Creating Hypothesis Assignments in Canvas and Using Canvas Groups to Create Hypothesis Reading Groups.

Grading Student Annotations in Canvas

Hypothesis assignments are graded in SpeedGrader. For instructions on grading a Hypothesis assignment in Canvas, see the Hypothesis article Grading Student Annotations in Canvas.

Introducing Students to Hypothesis

Please see the Hypothesis article Introduction to Hypothesis LMS App for Students.