Social annotation promotes active learning and fosters collaboration among students and instructors. With social annotation, students benefit from seeing multiple perspectives and interpretations from their peers, creating a rich, collaborative learning environment. This shared understanding helps develop more nuanced views of complex texts. Through the process of annotating and responding to others’ annotations, students become more aware of their thinking processes and reading strategies.
As social annotation gains popularity among instructors, there’s a growing need to expand the formats of digital content assigned beyond PDFs such as videos. UChicago supports two main video social annotation tools: Hypothesis and Panopto. Both tools can be integrated with Canvas as assignments for additional assessment functionality.
Comparing Annotations in Hypothesis and Panopto
| Hypothesis | Panopto | |
| Video availability | YouTube videos: Public or unlisted (anyone with link) | Videos in Panopto (upload or record) |
| Grading | Supported in Speedgrader, filters comments by student | Cannot view student comments in Speedgrader but can assign holistic grades or feedback |
| Live social annotation | Click on red update button to see new annotations | Need to manually refresh page for new comments to appear |
| Comment association | Attached to a caption (generated by YouTube) | Attached to a timestamp |
| Auto captions | Yes; imports captions from YouTube that may contain errors | Yes; may contain errors that are correctable |
| Reply to comments | Yes | Yes |
Hypothesis and Panopto offer distinct approaches to video annotation as Canvas assignments. While both platforms support the ability to reply to previous comments, enabling threaded discussions, there are notable differences:
- While Hypothesis works only with YouTube videos that are either public or unlisted (accessible via link), Panopto requires videos to be uploaded or recorded within its platform.
- For assessment purposes, Hypothesis integrates well with Speedgrader and allows for the filtering of individual students’ comments, while Panopto only supports holistic grading without the ability to view individual student comments in Speedgrader.
- In terms of real-time collaboration, Hypothesis shows a refresh annotations button on the top right corner when new comments are added, whereas Panopto users need to manually refresh their page to see new comments.
- Hypothesis allows users to attach annotations to specific captions, whereas Panopto only allows comments to be linked to timestamps.
When and How to Use Each Tool
Both Hypothesis and Panopto allow users to annotate and discuss specific moments in videos, though the choice between them often depends on the video source and format. Hypothesis, while more convenient for grading purposes, is limited to public or unlisted YouTube videos with transcriptions. In contrast, Panopto offers greater flexibility with video sources – supporting downloaded content from various platforms and personal recordings with or without transcriptions – but provides a less streamlined grading experience.
- Learn how to assign a YouTube video to annotate in Hypothesis
- Learn how to assign a video to annotate using Panopto
Conclusion
In conclusion, instructors may choose to use either Hypothesis or Panopto to set up video annotation assignments depending on the source of the videos and requirements for individual grading. For more information on the pedagogical benefits of social annotation, see the ATS articles Social Annotation and the Pedagogy of Hypothes.is and Learn How UChicago Instructors Promote Learning with Social Annotation. For how these two tools can be used outside of Canvas, see Use the Hypothes.is Chrome Plug-in for Research and the Panopto website.
(cover photo by Megan_Rexazin_Conde from Pixabay)
