 Hello and welcome to collaborative annotation of OER texts, a tool for student learning and OER sustainability. I'm Anna Mills, I teach English at College of Marin. I'm the English discipline lead for the OER initiative of the California Community Colleges and author of an OER textbook how arguments work. So this talk comes out of my experience assigning collaborative annotation of my OER textbook for three semesters. And before that I assigned collaborative annotation of other kinds of readings, and I led periodic trainings in my department where we explored best practices for annotation assignments. So collaborative annotation is becoming increasingly popular as a pedagogical practice. It's also called social annotation. It basically means that students are not just commenting on a text in the margins but they're also seeing each other's comments, and they're able to reply to other students comments and questions. It's a lot like commenting in Word or Google Docs, but it's social, and it can extend to other file formats. The two most common platforms for social annotation are hypothesis and perusal. More about those later. So I think it's key to note that this is a practice that just isn't possible with commercial textbooks for the most part. They don't want to give direct access through the web or allow for downloads of PDFs of their textbooks. And so the only way would be to sort of pay an additional fee through perusal to buy the textbook through them. But it's always possible with OER textbooks. So the combination is a fantastic one. It means that student encounters with our textbooks are active, social and fruitful in many ways. So some leaders in this field are Robin DeRosa, director of the Open Learning and Teaching Collaborative at Plymouth State University. She developed a textbook with her students using hypothesis annotation as a major tool for the project, and she has written about it and spoken about it. And she has a great phrase saying that collaborative annotation allows OER text to become living organic places. Another leader is Remy Khalir, professor of learning design and technology at the University of Colorado Denver School of Education. And he's done a lot of research into annotation just published a book on annotation. He has developed and promoted the marginal syllabus project, which is about inviting students to annotate our syllabi and has been very involved with hypothesis as a scholar in residence. And I'm inspired by both of these leaders as I explore this field. So, some of the benefits of annotation, specifically collaborative or social annotation are that it supports comprehension directly because students can be referencing each other's responses to the text to help them understand it. And they're also drawn to reexamine the text and reread because the comments are appearing right next to it. That's different from a discussion forum. Students will often test their understanding by suggesting examples from the textbook as a student did here. Trying out the concept from my argument textbook with an example. And then I was able to respond and say yes, exactly. I think the social component is very powerful because it helps students who are less comfortable speaking in class still engage socially with the other students. And there's a similar feel to social media here. So a little different from a discussion forum again. If you're annotating, it's, it's just a brief comment it feels a little less formal. And students have called hypothesis a literary Facebook. I have found that perusal also feels a lot like social annotation, particularly because there are hashtags and mentions. So it's a very comfortable platform for students and familiar in that way. So that is also helps to support an equity centered pedagogy. Because making reading social allows students who have similar identity specific reactions to the material to bond and support each other and see their experience reflected right next to the text, rather than feeling separate from or alienated from it. So, and part of that is the power dynamic, because the annotation is happening right next to the text, alongside it, it's sort of visual evidence that the text is not the only authority. The students are speaking back to it. And here's an example where a student responded to another student that mentioned Spanglish. And you know she really elaborated on her Mexican heritage and the kind of slang that's used in Mexico City. And you know the differences among different kinds of regional Spanish to reflect on code switching. And so she really made this topic her own. And I think that students feel really validated on are much more likely to speak in class when I'm inviting them to elaborate on something they've already written about in the annotations. So I'll say, oh, let's see, I mentioned that topic, I think in the annotation. She was talking about this, did you want to elaborate. You know, they don't have to but they often do. And I think that's especially beneficial for struggling and less confident learners. Here's an example where a student reassures another student about her English fluency. There's an exchange between non-native speakers and sharing a sense of embarrassment and a sense of, you know, how much they want to learn standard English. And another student who is a native speaker is responding and reassuring one of them that her English is fine. So I think as I mentioned, by highlighting student voices right alongside the text, there's a shift in the power dynamic. So I think this is really helping to democratize learning. It sends a powerful message about the value of the students' words and the relevance of the students' words. And that's a segue into how it supports open pedagogy because the whole idea of open pedagogy is that we're inviting students to become collaborators in shaping OER materials. And so we can see student annotations as part of that collaboration, as part of a process of revising and improving an OER textbook. And I think that that's not just a benefit for the quality of the OER text, but it's also a chance to model our openness to revision and collaboration as fundamental values of academia and to show students that they are invited into that collaboration and to show them respect as our partners. For example, you know, we can see where students are confused in the annotations and we can tie that directly to a specific line in the text that they have highlighted. And there's a very organic dynamic of seeing the student comment of confusion and just wanting to respond informally as a teacher. And I think that that can be a great first step for us as OER authors to generate ideas for revision. So here's an example where a student's question makes me think of a point I can add. To clarify what a particular fallacy is. And, and you can see in the annotation I have a few sentences that could then maybe become the basis for a draft of a revision. A couple of students were confused about inductive and deductive arguments and that was a good flag for me to say, I need to revise this section. I know that, like thank you because I think I need to revise this. Here I realized, oh the student was actually surprised by this idea so maybe it makes sense to highlight it a bit more and add an example of it. And I think you know as a textbook author I'm constantly thinking, well what kind of example would be interesting to students here or what would seem relevant, timely, compelling, constantly wondering that, right. And so student annotations are a space where we can sort of find out what is interesting to them, and maybe they can make suggestions for the kinds of examples they want to see. So how does this work in practice. Let's look at a little introduction to how to set this up for a course. So, the first step would be to choose which platform you want to use for collaborative annotation and consider whether it's important to you to sync this annotation system to your learning management system. So the platforms that I have seen people use our hypothesis perusal and also Google Drive or Google Docs. So that first option. The benefit is that you don't need to create a new account or get used to a new platform and students also don't need to. It's a very common procedure in many fields to create a doc or upload a PDF enable commenting and share a link with students so immediately available as a as a way to try this out. The cons are that it's not too easy to track student participation. So I think it's important for manually logging each comment, and if you've assigned multiple comments this can quickly get unwieldy. I have known of teachers to ask students to log their own participation on an honor system. But I think either is that concern about a large number of comments. It's critical to sort of sort through them and connect them to the text and process all of them. So, the hypothesis annotation platform is another option. There are some quotes here from the hypothesis website. Their ambition is to create a conversation layer over the entire web that works everywhere. They're committed to making their own software open source. And they're committed in principle to making as much content as possible free open free and open. So it can be used really for many purposes across the web for private groups professional development, or for public annotations of any web page. You can use your plug plug in available. If you want to use it to annotate web pages and public annotations are automatically licensed CC zero. You can create an account at web that hypothesis hypothesis. There's a dot before the is. So we have to we are platforms. There's a lot of other platforms and Libre text that have already partnered to allow for integrated use of hypothesis alongside their textbooks without installation of any additional software or plugins or anything like that. So if you wanted to try that if you're using a book with Libre text or press books. You just need to look for this very, very small little arrow at the top right of each page of every Libre text textbook and click it. You will see a pane on the right for annotations just like this and it's very similar in press books. You just need to make sure that the hypothesis plug in is activated in your book in press books. Now if you're using hypothesis you probably want to create a private group for your class so that they're not required to post publicly to the entire web. They would then need to create a hypothesis account and join that private group. You can give them a link to join. You still do need to log their participation manually, or have them log it themselves. If you've set it up this way, but one nice feature is that then in your hypothesis account you can go in and see who the members are of that private group you created for your class and how many posts each person has made, and you can sort of go through by looking then and see what they've done. So here's what the hypothesis annotation pane looks like in Libre text. Next to a Libre text page. You can see they're using hashtags there. Alternately, we have the perusal platform. Perusal has sort of a built in class setup that does allow for creating and tracking assignments. So it does facilitate grading, even when you're not syncing it with a learning management system. You would create a class on perusal.com and students would create accounts and join the class with a code. And then also they would have privacy in terms of only class members being able to see their annotations. There has been some concern about perusal and surveillance. You just want to take note of the scoring options in perusal, which ones are turned off which ones are turned on and how you feel about that and their policies. So options do check how long a student spends on reading, whether they go through the whole document or not, and there are some other measures of active engagement. It's not totally clear what is being measured there. One point that I've seen made on Twitter is that those algorithms may be unfair to students who are printing out the text to read it and then going back later to annotate digitally. They may be spending more time reading than the software detects. That said, the automated scoring options in perusal, even when you turn off these surveillance features, do allow for automated credit for annotations. And that allows teachers to focus on sort of enjoying and responding to the comments rather than logging participation. This is a course landing page in perusal listing assignments in the middle and telling me when I have new conversations, new posts to read for a specific reading that I've assigned. And this is the start of a textbook chapter in perusal. And you can see all the student comments, little previews of them on the right. They also, it also tags which ones are questions. And students have a lot of options for the annotation, including video audio links, emojis, and mentions of other students. So, if you do want to explore integrating your annotation system with your learning management system, that is possible in both hypothesis and perusal and it does streamline the assessment process. If you want to give credit for annotating as a homework assignment. It's free. So hypothesis is very generous about offering free institutional trials. But they do have a subscription model. So the institution would subscribe to to use hypothesis as an app within canvas, or another learning management system. Not an additional cost to students, however. If perusal is free to institutions, their model is that students pay if the instructor assigns a commercial book. So, annotating OER texts is free, whether they're PDFs or web pages. One of the first steps to get this going would be to work with your IT department because they will want to check hypothesis or perusal before installing it. They will want to assess it for privacy, security and accessibility concerns, most likely. They will want to ask for permission. It is possible to install it, either one individually as an app in your course, depending on the setup of your learning management system it may be possible. You can reach out directly to hypothesis or perusal to get that started. Once you have permission from your IT department. Once you have that setup in your learning management system, you're going to be adding assignments as you normally would in your LMS and then choosing in canvas you choose for submission type external tool, and then you would choose hypothesis or perusal. With hypothesis, you choose a file or website to annotate, and then you're using your learning management system grading feature speed grader to go through those annotations. However, with perusal you have a parallel course set up in the perusal system, and you have a parallel assignment with the same name as your canvas assignment. However, the grades do sync back to the canvas grade book. While both platforms can work with PDFs or public web pages. I have found that perusal seems to work better with PDFs. So you may want to download PDFs from your OER text and upload them to perusal. Okay. So, I have offered a set of resources for setting up either of those platforms through any of the methods that I've just gone over. I access these links through the presentation slides themselves. And also I have a set of resources for thinking about annotation for open pedagogy, including works by Robin DeRosa and Remy Khalir. And my own project, which is a student contribution contest where students submit their annotations to the contest. And the annotations then become a part of the revision process for the textbook. So I would love to receive any questions or comments about this presentation. You can find me on Twitter at English OER, or you can email me. ARmillsatmarin.edu and I wanted to thank the students who generously allowed me to share their annotations as part of this presentation. Thank you so much and I hope this is helpful.