As the push to eliminate financial barriers to accessing information and the subsequent conversation about increasing the use of Open Educational Resources in higher education continues, we are charged with exploring ways to assist students in using the resources available to them.
The use of primarily digitized information is new to many students as much of their academic experience incorporated a textbook as the central repository of information; thus, many of our students are accustomed to having a textbook that guides their learning. This factor does not necessarily make the textbook a preferable option but it is the medium through which our students have been conditioned to learn. With the use of Open Education Resources students must glean information from a variety of articles which potentially come in various digital formats including PDF, websites and blogs. PDF documents are easier for students to print, which allows for reading and annotating on paper as they have traditionally done. However, printing websites and blogs can be onerous and ineffective due to the presence of advertisements and similar distractors. So how can students interact with text on websites? The free web tool Hypothesis has the potential to be a significant help in this regard. Hypothesis allows students to input a URL and then annotate directly on the webpage. Hypothesis has three key features: Ability to Annotate Hypothesis has the functionality to highlight text, add annotations to highlighted text and record notes.
Students can get a link to their annotations so that their work can be submitted to the instructor through uLearn. Ability to Annotate and Work in Groups Hypothesis also has the ability to create groups so that students can communicate about their readings.
As an instructor in the higher education setting, consider referring students to Hypothesis to assist with their reading of digital text, you can put a link to it in your uLearn course. If you are considering making the switch to OER, then this web tool might bring you comfort knowing that your students will be able to read and annotate the provided articles as they did when they purchased a textbook.
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