1

In the course Current Topics in Quality Engineering, students were required to perform scientific research by accessing the resources from scientific journals and publications. They were expected to debate the applicability of traditional quality management practices in today’s business environment to determine to what extent they maintained relevance while evaluating the impact of technological changes. The students were also required to assess the current thinking and practices in quality engineering to comment on the efficacy of such practices. Their assessments and efficacy of the Research Techniques, Quality Tools, Quality 4.0, Industry 4.0, and Emerging Technologies had to be justified and completed by engaging in conversations during the online sessions using the Hypothes.is social annotation tool.

Annotations are remarks attached to specific parts of a document. A digital annotation tool provides the capability to make annotations to online material. When this tool enables users to share their annotations with a community, it is called social annotation tool (SA) (Krouska et al., 2018), while the documents that are annotated are more likely to be recalled than those that are not (Yang et al., 2011).

In this study, the data was collected to analyze whether the students who attended the classes and engaged online during the synchronous learning through self-directed participation, while using the social annotation tool Hypothes.is, performed better in the final test.