 So, thanks everyone again for joining today, our session on social annotation to foster equity and belonging in education. So great of you all to join, you know, as we get into the depths of the spring semester. So today I'm going to start by talking about some of the kind of issues we're facing in higher education today with issues of equity and inclusion and belonging in our classes. Some ways we can respond to those issues as educators in the higher education space. I will then kind of shift into talking about what social annotation is and how we can use social annotation to increase equity and belonging in our classes. I have discussion in Q&A at the end here but please feel free to use the chat throughout to, you know, ask questions we don't have to wait until the end to, you know, be asking questions about things so please feel free. My name is Christina Carolus. I am a customer success manager here at Hypothesis and my colleagues Becky and Jessica are also joining today to help with the chat and they are also customer success managers so we help faculty and staff at schools like yours use Hypothesis and we can help with training and help you get all set up so please reach out to us and we'll have this success email if you need any assistance with that. I am in, as I mentioned, the very warm Southern New Jersey. I come from an instructional design background and I also adjunct as an instructor at Rutgers University so I use Hypothesis in my own courses as well. So I want to start by kind of talking about the landscape of higher education, especially as we have been entering the post COVID years and I say post COVID because you know COVID is still a thing. But we're kind of higher education has kind of moved into a schedule that is, you know, looking more like it did before you know COVID hit us. So, since 2020 since COVID struck in 2020 we've seen declining enrollments in higher education. We've seen an overall 4.7% enrollment drop in spring 2022. And that adds to a total of 9.4% since the start of the pandemic so over one million students have left the higher education or not joined higher education since the beginning of the pandemic. And this is a more pronounced decline amongst black students. So the first year student enrollment for black students dropped six and a half percent this year. And that compounds to a total of 18.7% decrease for black students since spring 2020. So that's a huge decline in enrollment for black students and this is all coming from an edge of cause report that is linked in the notes of the slides if you want to check that out. In addition, we are seeing increased number of students with disabilities in our higher education classrooms. 10% of students in higher ed have disabilities, but only a third of those students are actually reporting those and requesting perhaps requesting accommodations, because of potential discrimination. Or they're not sure how to navigate that resource space. So we have this issue of declining enrollments we have students with different abilities coming into our classrooms, and we have to, you know, kind of think about how can we address all these things. And again, I'm bringing this to you from like an edge of cause report and just my own experiences as an educator. I am definitely not an expert in higher education enrollments and what we're looking at but as someone with an instructional design education background I hope I can shed some light on how we can create more inclusive space for our students. So, how can we respond as educators to encourage students to, you know, stay in school retain retain their enrollment in higher education and make sure that all types of students from all backgrounds and all abilities are welcome and included in our classes. First, I think is an important to just meet students where they are and I think some of the tips that'll go into later on will help you do this with social annotation. So, I'm sure a lot of you all because you're here you are already doing this, but I think it's important to remember that we have to teach the students that we have and not the students that we think should be in our classes or the students that we think we should have. We have to, you know, teach the students as they come to us. Hypothesis social annotation, I'll talk a little bit later on, will allow us to offer flexible ways to engage with course content. I will talking about this more in depth, but we have multimodal ways of engaging with course materials with hypothesis, and we also have different, like levels of formality of engaging with materials so using social annotation will offer students a way to engage perhaps more formally more informally use images use video in a personal way or an analytic way. So, as we'll see a hypothesis offers lots of different ways for students to engage with the material in a way that is meaningful to them. I think as students are struggling in higher ed, we can also offer more low stakes assessments in the classroom. Oftentimes, in college classes, we are relying on summative assessments for large portions of the grade. And that can sometimes favor students who come from more privileged backgrounds who maybe know how to do school a little bit more rightly, they know how to study, they know what the term office hours means, they know how to take notes, things that they have learned how to do in their classroom. Students who maybe are still learning those skills could benefit from more low stakes assessments in their courses, as there will be more opportunities for feedback and guidance. And then finally, something that's really, really important is the ability to decrease isolation among students and increase belonging and community. So oftentimes students are leaving school because they think they just don't belong there they can't do it it's not for them. And giving them a space to develop community and see that others like them engaging with courses. That's a big part of, you know, retaining students in higher education. And finally, designing with accessible course materials in mind. I'll talk a little bit about this but just making sure that we are using texts that are accessible and giving students multiple means of representation. So these are just some broad ideas of what we'll be talking about today, and getting more into details, a little later on. So before I dive in to some specific ideas of how hypothesis social annotation can help. I just want to see what everyone's experience with hypothesis is so I'm going to launch a poll really quick if y'all could take the poll and let me know if you've used hypothesis social annotation for and perhaps how you have used it or really how often you've used it. Okay, great. So it looks like there are a few people here who aren't sure what hypothesis. So I want to take a second to make sure we go over what hypothesis social annotation is. And then I'll dive into those tips and how we can use it to increase equity and belonging in our classes. Thanks for participating in my poll. So I have pulled up a hypothesis enabled reading that I have in a sample course here. Basically, what I have is, you can load a PDF or a URL of a file or reading into your course. So my example is a PDF chapter from an open education textbook so open education physics textbook. That's what I have on the left hand side. And I've loaded it into my Canvas course, although as we'll see hypothesis works with many LMSs. And then on the right hand side, what hypothesis is enabling is this functionality for students to add annotations and have a conversation about the text as they're reading the text. So hypothesis is basically just plopping the sidebar that we see on the right hand side of the reading over the text that we're already loading into our students in our learning management system. So I want to highlight a couple of things for those of you that haven't seen hypothesis before. On the right hand side, you'll notice that the annotations themselves quote the text that the students are discussing. So you can see on the left hand side in the PDF itself that this sentence that I've kind of boxed here on the left is the same sentence that Jennifer is asking a question about on the right. So I can see specifically what piece of text Jennifer is discussing. And if I hover over this text, I'll see that it changes color on the left right so I can kind of see which bits of text each person is talking about in the annotations. You also may have noticed that some of my annotations have a spot to show the replies so there's this little link I can click to show replies. If I click on that, you'll see replies to the annotations so annotations can be anchored to the text itself, or they can be anchored to other annotations. So these students can have a conversation about a specific quote from the text in a threaded discussion. Like you see here so Jennifer has kind of written out what this this formula is actually calling for Emily because asking a question about you know how how this is how this is actually working. And then if I scroll down and show other replies you'll notice there's a video embedded in one of the annotations here about the law of conservation of momentum. So we'll see how multimedia can come into play here as well. So this is the basics of what hypothesis is letting me do basically just letting me take this. This annotation sidebar. And like I said the students can annotate as their reading so they can highlight the text, click annotate, add their thoughts. It's not a very meaningful thought, and then continue on with reading. So they can complete the reading and have a conversation, all as part of one activity. Which is different from how you know a traditional discussion board might have students doing the reading as one activity and then going to a different space as a separate activity to participate in a discussion. So all my students in my class are seeing each other's annotations here so it's a collaborative experience as well. So that's the basics of what hypothesis is and what it lets me do as the instructor with my students. If you are new that thanks for hanging in. And if you have any questions about that. You can throw them in the chat or raise your hand and we can take a moment to address those. We talked about what it looks like to annotate in hypothesis. As I mentioned, if you're here, your school likely has an agreement with hypothesis is subscription with hypothesis. And it's likely already available in your learning management system so you can load readings into blackboard or canvas or Moodle or bright space whatever you're using, and add hypothesis to those readings. There are resources for each of those learning management systems are linked here so if you don't know how to add hypothesis to your readings you can check out the links on the slide I'm pointing over here because my slides are over here but that might not make sense to you. And our success team can also help you with that so our the email is later on in the presentation I'll highlight that as well. So, bringing us back to the idea of social annotation for equity and belonging in the classroom. How does this all fit together. So there's a three kind of main themes I'm going to focus on here consistently using social annotation in your classes, offers multiple means of engagement for your students, which is a principle of universal design for learning. It cultivates a sense of community and belonging, which is really important for retention and provides low stakes opportunities for your students to engage with course materials, which gives them opportunities to improve and get some feedback from you and from their peers. Hypothesis does this because it makes reading active visible and social. It's kind of our motto here so if you've attended our webinars you probably heard this feel before. It makes reading active because it's asking students to engage with the text in a way that again some of our students might not have actually been explicitly taught to do before. It's asking them as they read to think about how they're understanding the reading and respond in the annotations. So they're reflecting on the reading as they're doing it and thinking about what do I get what do I not understand what do I have questions about what am I connecting with and then those can come out in the annotations if we're prompting them in the right way. So it makes reading visible for us as the instructors. So sometimes we're a little bit in the dark as, as far as how students can, how students are understanding things what are they getting what are they not understanding, and we can then see their questions. I actually had this in an assignment a couple weeks ago with my students I have my students annotate the instructions for their project that was due somewhat recently. So they had to go in and add annotations to the project instructions which included a rubric. And I was actually I was kind of nervous about this assignment because I was like what it like what if they don't have any questions. They actually had a lot of questions. And they answered each other and I was also able to provide answers in a way that everyone could see the responses so I would reply to the annotation and you know that interaction was visible to the entire class. So everyone could benefit from that question and answer. And finally hypothesis makes reading social, which the feedback I get from my students is that this is their favorite part of using hypothesis. It lets them see what their other classmates are thinking and how they're connecting with the reading. What does it look like to put these three kind of circles I've had a, how are we taking social annotation and using it to promote equity and belonging in our classes. What does this actually look like. I mentioned using low stakes or formative assessments. I think consistently introducing social annotation in your course. So doing so in a way that's maybe more so than just like a couple assignments offers opportunities for students to engage in a lower stakes way with the course materials. So they have kind of like these rehearsal assignments before the big summative assessments right there reading and reflecting and you can come in with the annotations and provide guidance. They can also see the others might have the same questions as them, and that can help increase students belonging in a class if they see like oh I'm not the only one that has this question. And they can respond to each other's questions which can help increase their confidence and their own self efficacy. So I think scaffolding larger assignments can also be helpful as well. So I mentioned that project where my students a couple weeks ago were annotating the project instructions. I also had them annotate a document that they it was like a mean kind of piece they had to read through before the project and define specific values that they saw throughout the document and tag them in their annotations. So that became a reference for the project for the students later on. And it also gave me an opportunity to see how they were interpreting these ethical values that we were discussing and if some students needed some kind of redirecting before they got to the project. Another thing that social annotation allows us to do is to build a community of knowledge creators. And this is, I think, really important in building an inclusive classroom. Students have come to our classes with a wealth of knowledge and a wealth of life experience. And oftentimes they come to class and they see, you know, professors that maybe they don't always relate to. And they feel like you know their knowledge that they're bringing is not necessarily something that can contribute as much to the conversation. But social annotation allows us to bring that knowledge and so my class is the gender studies class. And my students come from lots of different majors. They come from like criminal justice psychology. I'm trying to think of my most common majors that I see. And so they bring in information from the classes they've taken in their own majors, and they often talk about those things in the annotations, which is helpful because it broadens the actual scope of our class. And they're contributing to the knowledge of our course and it's not just me as the expert kind of, you know, this top down flow of information. I also encourage peer to peer learning with social annotation. Like I said, with students asking questions oftentimes other students will come in and answer those questions. And they, that is kind of taking the load off of me and also helping students build confidence in their own abilities. So the conversation can also increase inclusivity and belonging because it's making space for all student voices. So, sometimes in face to face classes we often are hearing from the same students raising their hands. Some students might not feel comfortable speaking up in class or take a little bit longer to process. And then, you know, the conversation might move a little bit faster than they can stay engaged with, but social annotation offers them a new way to engage through text or images or video contributions. And then they might even bring those things inside the classroom so it's offering a different way for a bigger breadth of students to engage. Another example of a way to build a community with social annotation is to start by annotating the syllabus. And I think that that's a great way to just get started with like this is a, an open class, an opportunity to discuss the class as a community, rather than just like me kind of serving policies from the top down. I also wanted to mention because in the past couple of slides I've mentioned this whole idea of peer to peer learning and students getting gaining more confidence by being able to address their classmates questions. There is a study that was done about social annotation, improving students self efficacy. So I mentioned sometimes students withdraw from courses or maybe from higher education overall because they don't have a strong sense of self efficacy. They don't, you know, believe in themselves or see themselves as being able to, you know, complete a certain course. But this case study and these business statistics courses in the link study looked at social annotation and self advocacy specifically. And they compared it to social annotation compared to traditional discussion boards. The big difference here being that social annotation allows you to anchor your annotation to a specific piece of text, whereas the traditional discussion board that is not anchored. You know, you're just, you're kind of just posting, and it's not connected to a specific piece of text. Anchoring conversations with social annotation allowed the students to clarify specific issues within the text, and students being able to do this from one another, increased student confidence and the motivation to help others. And they felt like they had a bigger influence on the course conversations. So I think that bringing in social annotation can help students see kind of themselves reflected in and who else is participating in the course and build strength in their own capabilities. So I saw a question in the chat, how do you address any instances in which a student answers another student's question in a way that's either incorrect or is biased or counter to the course community goals. That's a really great question. I think that is a can be a sensitive matter, especially if it's something that is a little bit more biased. And in that case, I would probably respond to the thread in the, in the annotations themselves so that the whole class could see, and just try and provide like a gentle redirection, and then be more specific to that individual and either in the grading feedback for the annotation or in an email or something like that, and let them know like, you know, here's why this wasn't necessarily, you know, on the right track or you know, we want to try and like, not bring those biases into the course, but at the same time recognizing that I appreciate that they have responded to their classmate and attempted to address an issue. To be honest, I haven't seen students trying to respond to each other in my own classes at least if they don't feel confident about a specific question. I usually more so see students coming in and being like, oh, like yeah, I wasn't sure about that too. But that's a good question. I hope I provided some guidance there. I think another way to really encourage inclusivity and belonging in our social annotation assignments is to encourage students to incorporate multimedia into their annotations. So I mentioned the principles of universal design for learning earlier on. So one of the principles of universal design for learning or learning that will is accessible to all types of learners, a design for all types of learners, including neurodiverse learners is a multiple means of representation so representing something not just through text, maybe we are representing a concept using an image or diagram or a video. And I have an example in the annotations here that is like literally just me needing my own multiple means of representation because spoiler I'm actually Jennifer, I annotated this document. And I did not understand the text definition of the law of conservation of momentum. I read it and I was like this does not make sense to me, which is terrible because my husband is a physics, where he was a physics teacher so hopefully he can't hear me right now, but I didn't understand what this meant. So I went and watch this video which shows two pool to pool balls hitting each other. And when they hit each other you can see what happens to the momentum and how it's transferred from one pool ball to the other. So I didn't understand it when I read the definition, but I did understand it when I watched the video. And when we can bring all these things in to one place for the students to see. It can really help their, their understanding. And that's what I mean here with using the text as a collaborative resource space. So the annotations can serve not only as a space for students to reflect and discuss with one another but it can become a reference point for them to come back and look for definitions or videos to better understand concepts. And finally, I think the annotations provide a space to model critical thinking for your students, and to practice questioning. So one of the things that I think a lot of us encounter in higher education is that students don't necessarily come in with skills to critically analyze texts. So if we go in as instructors and pre annotate documents, we can model for the students what critically looking at a text looks like. What kind of annotations, do we expect to see how do we ourselves question the authors, sometimes our students don't even know that they can question the authors. So I think us modeling that for them can help them provide help them start to learn the skills and provide them a space to practice those skills with our continued guidance and feedback. So I mentioned a lot of different ways that you can think about using hypothesis in your courses in a way that would promote equity and belonging. There are different starter assignments here to help you get started with instructions. I mentioned earlier sometimes students need a very specific prompts to get them started. So like I said, they don't always know how to create a meaningful annotation on the text. I think the guidance and the prompts we give them for annotating can be really important and setting them up for success. So you can check out some of our assignments here syllabus annotation assignment. This might be helpful to use at the beginning of the semester to create that sense of community and student belonging and they feel like they have a voice in the course. The general sorry went ahead when I didn't mean to general annotation assignment is just kind of more generic for prompting students to annotate most texts. And then I highlighted here the annotation assignment for academic articles so if you are trying to help students kind of piece through scholarly articles and look at methods or research discussion specifically this could be helpful for you. I would also encourage you to check out if you didn't attend our liquid margins faculty panel on fostering diverse learning environments. We had that a few weeks back with three faculty members from across the country. And they talked about how they're using hypothesis in their courses to foster equity and belonging. It was a really great panel. I was so encouraged by you know what they contributed and so inspired by the different ideas that they shared so I would definitely check out the video that is embedded in the slides if you have not seen that. And I linked to some of the references I discussed here too. So I want to pause for a second and see if anyone has any other questions or thoughts that they'd like to share in the chat. Before I wrap up for the afternoon. You know we're a little bit after the half an hour but just a couple more, just a couple more slides. See, I'll give everyone a moment to type but just I mentioned a couple times that if you don't know how to set up a hypothesis assignment, you can email us success at hypothesis. If you would like any assistance and we'll try it will point you to the right person. Yes, I saw in the chat if this will be recorded and available later I will email out the recording and the slides. And I'll put the link to the slides in the chat in case anyone missed that in the beginning to a couple other things that might be helpful are I mentioned liquid margins linked to one of our most recent faculty panels. Also, I should I shared some annotation starter assignments earlier but we also have this really great repository of resources submitted by other educators that have used social annotation. So if you want to see specific assignment ideas for different disciplines, you can see what other faculty have contributed to our resource project here, our resource repository. This is educator forum is also interesting to check out to see how other people are using hypothesis if you want a space to brainstorm. And then our technical support team as well is always available to help. I saw a question come into the chat would you say is the most significant change to your own teaching as a result of using hypothesis in your own courses. So I think that hypothesis that's a really great question. A couple things. I think that hypothesis allows me to better evaluate my summative assessments, because it gives me a sense of how students are responding to the materials as as they're engaging throughout the course. So when I get to the summative assessments I have a better sense of like, are the students actually ready to handle this or where are their knowledge gaps. So that's kind of like, as a course is running I can better evaluate that. I would say, like a concrete change in my overall teaching practices is that after my first semester teaching with hypothesis is I got rid of my discussion boards. After that, because my students in their end of course evaluation, they said they rated all of their assignment types of what was most helpful to their learning and what was least helpful to their learning. My students said that social annotation was the most helpful to their learning that that got the strongest results out of like I think I had like five assignment types back in 2019 when I started using hypothesis. And then the discussion boards ranked dead last I really this isn't valuable everyone's just saying the same thing. I were not really like learning anything extra from these assignments so I got rid of my discussion boards and just kind of created more hypothesis assignments because I did see a diversity in the way the students were responding to the text versus a lot of like echoing in discussion where the students kind of rigor rotating the same responses. So that's probably the biggest like concrete change. Thanks for that good question john. And then hypothesis Academy I feel like transitioning back to this is weird. We are starting a new cohort of hypothesis Academy this coming Tuesday, April 18. If you want to think about more how you can use hypothesis in your own courses and brainstorm your own assignment with some feedback from hypothesis customer success managers like me and Jessica and Becky, I would join hypothesis Academy. It's our certified educator credential course two week asynchronous course because you can pop in when you are available to learn more about hypothesis and brainstorm with other educators across the country on using hypothesis. And then for our partner workshops you are at a partner workshop so congratulations on making it here today. Usually we have partner workshops very typically at 1pm Eastern on Tuesdays so you can check out other other sessions coming up here apparently losing the ability to speak as I reached the end here. Finally, our email again is in the slide deck if you're not sure how to set up hypothesis and or you want to brainstorm. We like to meet with people and brainstorm how they can use it in their courses you can reach out to our team, and we'll get you connected with the right person. So thanks again everyone for joining. I will hang around a moment to see if any others have questions and feel free to pop them in the chat or have a great day everyone is apparently melting like me so I hope everyone can stay cool. But thanks again for joining and I'll be sending out the recording later.