Academic Technology: Interactive Content: Home

Social annotation tools (e.g. Hypothes.is, Perusall) and reading list management systems which offer social annotation as part of their service (e.g., Leganto, Talis Elevate) allow groups to read/view and annotate a master copy of an online document/video together. The instructor provides questions, prompts or other instructions, and students reflect or respond in the margins, mark up the text, and add tags. With equity issues in mind, critical social annotation provides an avenue for pointing out exclusion and marginalized viewpoints. Some social annotation tools are commercialized via an enterprise subscription cost, and some also provide textbooks at a cost direct to students.

Types of Assignments

Instructors may use these tools in various ways. Here are some popular assignments:

• Read/view and respond: Students post their reaction to a text, image, audio clip, or video
• Q&A: Student post questions for the instructor to answer
• Instructor annotations: Instructors annotate a document, which models textual analysis and is a jumping off point for discussion
• Extra-textual: Extend annotation exercises to course syllabi, study guides, lecture notes, slide decks, etc.
• Collaborative editing: Instructors break students into small groups and have them critique and edit their peers work
• Multimedia writing: Students collaborate to create a multimedia text with image, audio, and video annotations
• AI fact-checking and critique: The instructor generates some text with an LLM and the students fact check it and add social annotations pointing to assigned course materials
• More suggestions: Starter assignments at hypothes.is

Legal and Ethical Issues

• Data, Privacy, and Surveillance: All of the concerns noted on the MNOP site's Data, Privacy, & Surveillance section also apply to social annotation tools.
• Copyright Infringement: If your social annotation platform requires uploading a PDF, and if the PDF is a digitized version of a physical text of which you are not the copyright holder, fair use analysis is required. In this case it would be advisable to contact a librarian to find out what the license allows.
• License Breaches: If the PDF was downloaded from a library database, it is possible there are contractual restrictions to uploading such a PDF into a social annotation tool due to licensing restrictions governed by the library's electronic subscription contract. In this case it would be advisable to contact a librarian to find out what the license allows.
• Payment Required for Free Materials: Perusall, and likely future platforms, commercialize free OER and public domain works by "requiring a donation," circumventing the true intentions of copyright holding authors who have openly licensed their work to provide free access.
• Accessibility: PDFs are known as the least accessible document type, causing issues for students trying to use a screen reader.
• Copyright liability: Terms of use likely state that liability for copyright infringement is lies solely with the person uploading the content, not the social annotation tool. This causes faculty and students to assume all the legal risk for uploading copyrighted content, whether that be the document which the class is annotating, or annotations a student may add quoting from a copyrighted work.
• Limited Perpetual Access: In some systems, texts can be purchased by the student as "perpetual access," but cannot be saved or accessed outside of the platform in which the text was purchased.
• Social Pressure and Bias: The public nature of social annotation could pressure students to conform to perceived norms or suppress their honest opinions, particularly if they know their contributions are being graded or closely monitored. This can stifle genuine engagement and critical thinking, and cause emotional harm.
• Equity in Participation: The public nature of social annotation could lead to unequal participation, where more vocal or confident students dominate the conversation, potentially marginalizing less confident or quieter peers. This dynamic can create an unequal learning environment.
• Data Ownership and Control: Questions about who owns and controls the data generated through these platforms (e.g., annotations, comments, and analytics) should be clarified before implementing this system and what rights students have regarding their own contributions should be clearly communicated in policies and procedures.

Further Reading and Viewing

• Social Annotation and an Inclusive Praxis for Open Pedagogy in the College Classroom by Monica Brown and Benjamin Croft from Boise State University
• In the margins: Using social annotation to support reading and writing by Matthew Luskey from University of Minnesota
• The educational use of social annotation tools in higher education: A literature review by Elena Novak, Rim Razzouk, & Tristan E. Johnson from University of Florida
• Social annotation: what are students’ perceptions and how does social annotation relate to grades? by Virginia Clinton-Lisell from University of North Dakota
• Collaborative Online Annotation: Pedagogy, Assessment and Platform ComparisonsCollaborative Online Annotation: Pedagogy, Assessment and Platform Comparisons by Gavin W. Porter from Harvard
• Stop, collaborate, and listen: How to transform a course with open pedagogy through teamwork, Hilary Bussell and Amanda Larson from Ohio State University, University Libraries

Courseware is any software which helps deliver instruction as part of a course. In our course materials context, courseware includes things like digital content bundled together with electronic textbooks (e.g., McGraw Hill Connect, Cengage Infuse), ancillary online homework systems (e.g., Lumen Learning, MyOpenMath, LibreText ADAPT) and online course providers (e.g., MITOpenCourseware, Saylor Academy,  edX). Courseware can be either open or commercial. Content-embedded assignments are activities and assessments integrated directly into course content to increase engagement and provide immediate feedback to students in real-time. Significantly, assignments that are part of content developed with third party tools (e.g., H5P, Lumen OHM, Leganto) can be assessed and recorded in the LMS course's gradebook if the tool is integrated in that LMS via LTI. 

Examples

• Lumen Learning Online Homework Manager

• OpenStax Assignable - currently in beta testing, this guide shows how it is integrated into the Canvas LMS
• Working with Assignments in Leganto - nuts and bolts guide on how to integrate a Leganto social annotation assignment into the Canvas LMS