We are happy to announce our Highlighter Classes and Groups are now available!

When we launched Highlighter in July, we had already began work on our Classes & Groups feature which allows for Highlighter users to create private or public groups.

We realized that there was a pain in the way that students were learning and felt that we could do something that was simple to implement and radically improved the engagement of students around online content.

There are already three major universities using Highlighter groups — University of Colorado, University of Washington, and Northwestern University. There are also going to be as many as 60 more universities using Highlighter in the next couple of months thanks to a partnership we have with eduCommons.

There are already hundreds of students using Highlighter Classes & Groups and making thousands of highlights. The professors that have implemented it are already seeing more engagement than ever before! Professors can monitor which students have interacted with the course material before class and even knowing the parts of their course material is raising the most questions among students.

Highlighter Classes & Groups is profoundly improving learning and engagement for higher education and soon K-12.

Check out what Dr. Mike Klymkowsky of the University of Colorado had to say about Highlighter:

Highlighter Groups from Highlighter on Vimeo.

How does Classes & Groups work?

Once a professor has added Highlighter to her online course material, she can set up a group for her class. If she wants anyone to be able to join the group she would make it public and if she wants the group to be invite only, she would make it private.

Once the Class has a name, she can invite all of her students. She can even invite her students into individual groups if she wants to divide the class into smaller groups. This feature allows students to make comments and share snippets of text only to their sub-groups. In other words, students will only see the comments and highlights of their fellow group members, not just all the comments made by everyone in the class.

Professors will receive an email each time a new highlight is made and from the Class profile page, they can monitor all the most active students and the most engaging content among other things.

We look forward to helping more professors engage with their students using Classes & Groups!