Hypothesis Announces the 2024 Social Learning Innovator Awards Winners

SAN FRANCISCO, October 10, 2024 (Newswire.com) - The Social Learning Innovator Awards 2024, hosted by the social annotation provider Hypothesis, celebrates outstanding educators and institutions that have revolutionized the world of education through the use of social learning across various disciplines.

The organization honors educators and institutions that excel in using social annotation to foster engaging learning experiences. This year, they invited educators to nominate themselves or their peers who have demonstrated innovative and impactful uses of social annotation.

The winners were selected from the award categories of higher education "Instructors" of every discipline, "Administrators," and a special "Institutional Award." This final award celebrates an institution that has adopted social learning at a broader scale, demonstrating a unique and transformative approach to collaborative learning across multiple disciplines or departments. 

The evaluation criteria for the awards focus on assessing the impact of social learning in the classroom and the innovative ways instructors or admins are using social learning to increase student engagement, peer collaboration, learning outcomes, and course comprehension. 

Joe Ferraro, CEO of Hypothesis, stated, "We believe that student engagement is the foundation of academic success. Our winners and nominees today have not only embraced that belief but have also exemplified the power of social learning in driving meaningful, collaborative experiences in education.”

The Institution-Wide winner from last year, Kim Grewe, also shared her enthusiasm at what Hypothesis was able to achieve at Northern Virginia Community College: “We believe in the power of social annotation for our online learners. In particular, this tool is something that is so simple to use and really does boost engagement, leading to more students passing and moving onto the next stage.”

Hypothesis would like to congratulate the winners, who are listed as follows:

• Winners:
  • Humanities and Arts: Brandon Marshall, Contra Costa College
  • Writing: Chip Gladson, Montgomery College, Maryland
  • STEM: Melanie Lenahan, Raritan Valley Community College
  • Health Science: Rachel Derr, Rutgers University - Camden
  • Business and Economics: Dr. Larry C. Giunipero, Florida State University
  • Social Sciences: Lyra Stein, Rutgers University - New Jersey
  • Institutional: Sarah Riforgiate and Amy Mangrich, University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee
  • Administrator: Dr. Ashley Love, University of Incarnate Word
  • OER: Diana Fordham, Missouri Southern State University 
  • Pedagogy: Caroline T. Schroeder, University of Oklahoma
  • AI: Eric Conrad, California State University - Stanislaus

The award ceremony will take place through a webinar on Thursday, October 17, at 1:00 p.m. ET. To register for the awards reception and hear from the award winners in more detail, click here.

About

Hypothesis is an advanced web annotation software provider seeking to implement a real-time conversation layer over the entire web. It enables sentence-level note-taking or critique on top of a diverse array of texts, such as blogs, legislation, articles, and news — with users creating over 65 million annotations thus far. Through partnerships with various organizations, the company aims to develop a platform for the next generation of read-write web applications.

Source: Hypothesis