AI system helps students join and deepen online reading discussions
Lookover: Scaffolding Student Participation in Social Annotation
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
Students often post comments on online reading platforms but many comments go unanswered and are repetitive or late. The authors found that students struggle to find discussions worth joining and to add valuable ideas. They created Lookover, a tool that shows active topics and suggests thoughtful questions to encourage better participation. A small study showed that the overview was helpful for some students, while the question prompts worked better for those already familiar with the topic.
What this means in practice
- •For platform developers: Integrate overview and question prompts to improve user engagement and quality of peer interaction in social annotation tools.
- •For online learning providers: Enhance course reading platforms to support sustained and substantive student discussions with AI-guided annotation features.
Authors
Yubo Zhou, Xinyi Xu, Zesen Zhao, Anhong Guo, Xinyue Chen
Abstract
Social annotation platforms such as Perusall and Hypothesis are widely used to support student engagement with course readings, often through required commenting. Yet visible participation does not necessarily produce sustained or substantive peer exchange. Analyzing six weeks of Perusall activity from a graduate course (2,873 comments), we found that participation was often fragmented: 53.5% of comments received no reply, 38.3% were posted within the final 12 hours before the deadline, and over one-third of a double-coded sample went no further than repeating or agreeing with the reading or a peer. Interviews pointed to two linked difficulties: locating a discussion worth entering and contributing something that meaningfully advances it. We present Lookover, an AI-assisted annotation system that scaffolds both stages without writing for students. Discussion Overview helps students identify active themes and relevant threads, while Spark Thinking poses questions that encourage them to move beyond reaction and restatement toward questioning, extending, and substantively responding to peers. A preliminary study with five participants found Discussion Overview valuable for those who noticed it, while the usefulness of Spark Thinking depended on how much a participant already knew about the topic.