Digital tools make it easier than ever for students and educators to have conversations in the margins of the texts they’re reading. The two popular tools that are being used on The Claremont Colleges Campuses for annotating readings are Hypothesis and Perusall.
Hypothesis, is a free, open-source tool. It is available as a Google Chrome browser extension (and a Firefox and Safari Bookmarklet), it lets users annotate publicly documents that are openly accessible with a URL. You can create public or private “rooms” for your class and students. Some campuses are piloting the institutional version of hypothesis that is embedded in their Sakai LMS. Limited library content may be uploaded into Sakai to be annotated under fair use because the content is being transformed, and under the TEACH Act is only accessible to the students in the class. To find out if your campus has Hypothesis integrated into Sakai, reach out to your campus IT.
Perusall has a similar interface for annotation. Unlike Hypothesis, the annotating all happens within the Perusall platform (not through a browser extension or integrated into Sakai). While it is free to sign up, Perusall contains materials provided by publishers (Cambridge University Press, Elesiver, McGraw Hill), that require purchase in order to annotate. The Claremont Colleges Library already subscribes to many of the materials in Perusall and our licensing agreements will not permit you to upload those materials to Perusal for your class or students use. This means you may not be able to upload our Library materials since Perusall is obligated to pay the publisher for each student that accesses a particular book, and this is infringe on the licensing agreements the library has established. Besides library materials, Perusall does allow users to upload content to annotate, as long as they have the proper permissions. To read more about using library materials in Perusall check out our FAQ.
