Meaningful online discussion begins when students and instructors engage together in the margins of shared, annotated readings. Learn more at a workshop tomorrow, Feb. 10.
As generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools continue to reshape higher education, many instructors are re-examining a familiar challenge: how to design learning experiences that promote genuine engagement with course readings, instead of routine participation or even AI-generated discussion posts.
Hypothesis, a social annotation tool integrated into Blackboard, offers a timely and effective response, especially for online and hybrid courses.
Unlike traditional discussion boards, which often ask students to comment about readings in a separate space, Hypothesis places conversation inside the text itself. Students highlight passages, ask questions, respond to peers, and build understanding together around specific ideas. By anchoring discussion directly in the text, this approach encourages close reading, critical thinking, and evidence-based dialogue — practices that students are less likely to develop when discussion contributions are generated without sustained engagement with the reading itself.
Just as importantly, Hypothesis can help address discussion board burnout, a concern many instructors and students share. Long, repetitive posts and delayed back-and-forth can make discussions feel disconnected from the learning process and can make meaningful student and faculty participation difficult to sustain. Social annotation shifts the focus from posting to engaging: Students contribute shorter, more targeted responses tied to specific passages, thus encouraging a practice that supports more concrete and responsive interaction among peers. For instructors, annotations create clearer opportunities to engage directly with student thinking by responding to particular questions, highlighting key interpretations, or modeling close reading within the text itself. Because both student and faculty contributions are anchored in the reading, dialogue becomes more focused, timely, and connected to course learning goals in ways that are often harder to achieve in traditional discussion boards.
For faculty, using a social annotation tool like Hypothesis often results in higher-quality engagement with fewer prompts, while for students, it can feel more conversational, collaborative, and purposeful. Participation becomes less about fulfilling a requirement and more about joining an ongoing dialogue about critical course content. As one student in a fall 2021 class remarked, “The annotations, instead [of traditional discussion boards], drove me to stay focused on what I was reading and, also, in cases where my peers had already read/marked annotations, it genuinely gave me additional perspectives and helped me recognize key points I may have otherwise glossed over.”
At a moment when concerns about AI use, student engagement, and academic integrity are very much “in the air,” Hypothesis supports learning designs that emphasize process, interaction, and shared inquiry. It doesn’t remove concerns about AI usage from the educational landscape, but it helps ensure that students are actively engaging with texts, ideas, and one another instead of outsourcing critical engagement with course readings and materials to AI tools.
And with Valentine’s Day just around the corner, it may be the perfect time to fall a little in love with a new approach to online discussion that has the potential to create meaningful connections between students, instructors, and course content.
Join faculty from the School of Graduate Studies at 12 p.m. US EST on Tuesday, Feb. 10, for a workshop on the benefits of Hypothesis annotation and learn how you can easily set up an annotation activity in your Blackboard course environment, either for an article or chapter, a website, or a YouTube video.
Register via our Zoom registration link for this workshop.
Isabell Cserno May, PhD, is an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Graduate Studies, where she directs and teaches in the Science Communication certificate program. May also directs the UMB Writing Center and is passionate about accessible pedagogies and communicating science with diverse audiences.