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Perusall

Perusall is a text-based social annotation/commenting/discussion tool. Instructors provide students with a text, and students use commenting to have an asynchronous discussion about the text. Depending on instructor settings, Perusall can auto-grade student work and provide instructors with analytics about how students are engaging with articles, chapters, webpages, videos, podcasts, and more.

Perusall can help increase student engagement, build community between your students, impact their motivation to complete readings and help them collaborate and communicate with each other. It can also be used in face-to-face classes as a supplement to in-person activities and instruction and in entirely online courses.

Getting Started

It is recommended that instructors begin the process by reviewing Perusall’s Getting Started Guide for Instructors.

Teaching Ideas and Use Cases

In a face-to-face course with multiple reading assignments, include all readings in Perusall. Ask students to read and comment before class and then review their comments before your in-class discussion. Star comments as you review the work students have done so you can use those comments to launch a more thorough dive into the content when you meet face-to-face.

Integrate a difficult text (video, reading, infographic, etc.) and ask students to fill it with questions they have. Use the “confusion report” included in Perusall to quickly pull together topics to cover in more detail in course videos or in-person sessions.

Add a Perusall assignment in which the text is about annotating. Students can practice using the features while learning about good annotation practices. Check out this article to learn more about annotation.

Read the experiences of a series of Vanderbilt instructors using Perusall in various fields, including law, chemistry, and business.

Using “differentiated assignments” and student upload folders in Perusall can allow students to use the annotation features of Perusall to give feedback to classmates. Perusall peer review directions.

Perusall texts don’t have to just be readings. You can integrate the annotation features with video, podcast and images. Integrating multimedia in your courses can lead to more inclusive teaching practices, helping students visualize course concepts, promote deeper learning and help students engage with varied content. Learn how to integrate video and podcasts as assignments or library texts in Perusall.

Citation: Perusall. North Carolina State University. Retrieved February 24, 2024 from https://teaching-resources.delta.ncsu.edu/perusall/.

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This teaching guide, which has been modified from its original form, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.