Getting started with Perusall

Instructor set up

Perusall is a collaborative annotation platform that encourages group reading and deeper engagement with course materials. It allows you and your students to discuss specific words, sentences, images and passages in a written text or video by highlighting key portions of a document for comment, questions, and discussion. Perusall was designed to be used with textbooks, many of which can be purchased by students digitally within Perusall.

1. To set up your Perusall course, go to a content area of your LEARN course, add a module to act as your Perusall access point, then select from Existing Activities, then click External Learning Tools, and select Perusall 1.3 Course from the links provided. The Perusall 1.3 course link allows students to access all of your Perusall assignments.
   
   

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2. Launch Perusall to create your D2L-Perusall integrated course. If you already have a Perusall account, you will be asked to confirm that you want your account linked to LEARN. If you do not have a Perusall account, you will be asked to create one.

3. Go to the Perusall help documentation for support with Perusall course settings, uploading content, creating assignments, and automatic grading.

4. Prior to uploading content to Perusall, review the copyright implications of using Perusall.

5. If you wish to copy your assignments from a previous term or course please follow these instructions for using Perusall to teach the same course again.

6. Your LEARN course roster will upload automatically into the Perusall course site. The Perusall default is to randomly assign students to groups of 20, but you can modify the group size or assign specific groups (settings > grouping). Since the rosters are synched, you can set up groups any time, although be mindful of drop/add dates.

7. You can now assign your students to the same groups in Perusall as in LEARN if that aligns with your course goals, recognizing that if groups are too small the levels of engagement may be diminished. Note: all assignments must have the same grouping if using this method.
   
   

Linking individual Perusall assignments in LEARN

It is not necessary to create individual links to each Perusall assignment in your LEARN content since students can access all assignments through the main Perusall 1.3 course link. However, you can use Perusall 1.3 Assignment to link to the corresponding Perusall assignment. To do this:

1. You must first create the assignment in Perusall.

2. In LEARN, go to Existing Activities and scroll down to Perusall 1.3 Assignment.

3. A window will pop up that will allow you to select a Perusall assignment to link.

4. Assignments will automatically be created in the gradebook as individual items (LEARN defaults items to 10 points) but points can be adjusted manually in your gradebook and/or moved into a Category. 
   
   

Grading in Perusall 

There are a variety of metrics that you can use to score the annotations within Perusall. You can use and adapt their suggested methods. You can always override students' scores. More information on using scoring in Perusall is available in their Scoring Document and their Scoring and Grades help documentation. You can adjust how assignments are score by going to Settings and select Scoring.

Grade sync

• If you would like to automatically sync the average of all Perusall assignments to a single grade item in the LEARN gradebook, launch into Perusall, select Settings > scoring > Grade sync to LMS > Automatically sync students' average scores to LMS, and then click Save changes. Note: the default weight is 10% for this grade item, which you may need to update.

• If you would like to sync individual assignment scores as separate grade items in the LEARN gradebook, launch into Perusall, select Settings > scoring > Grade sync to LMS > Automatically sync individual assignment scores to LMS, and then click Save changes. Note: the default weight is 10% for each Perusall assignment, which you will likely need to update.

• More information about syncing grades with LTI 1.3 is available on the Perusall knowledge base.

Communicating with your students about Perusall

It is a good idea to explain why you are using Perusall and how you hope it helps them achieve the learning outcomes of the course. You might include details such as:

• How many annotations they should write.

• How long their annotations should be.

• Expectations for interacting with their classmates. For example, “At least 2 of your 7 comments should be in response to a classmate.”

• What the goal of an annotation is. For example, “Each annotation should point to a specific rhetorical choice made in the text, and explain the effect that choice creates for the reader.”

• What a successful annotation looks like. Consider writing a sample comment in the document yourself and asking your students to look at it as a model of what they’re trying to do.

After the first Perusall assignment, in particular, touch base with your students about their work, either individually or as a class. It’s likely that the first set of student annotations will not meet your expectations. By explaining ways students can improve, and highlighting a few examples of strong annotations written by their classmates, you can help them to think about how to make progress on Perusall assignments throughout the term. You might wish to have the first Perusall assignment not count (if you are scoring them).

Benefits of Using Perusall

To learn more about the benefits of using Perusall and the evidence supporting this tool, see the CTE Teaching Tip: Perusall.

Do you still have questions?