Perusall

When the spring semester starts, I’ll be using Perusall for the first time, in my comparative politics course. I decided to finally experiment with it for three reasons. First, my previous attempts at getting students to engage in collaborative notetaking have mostly failed. Second, as I mention in that linked post, a couple of my colleagues have raved about Perusall’s ability to turn reading into a social learning process. Third, resiliency is as important as ever when it comes to course design. Given the pandemic and associated mitigation protocols, there is the chance that some or all of my students will be absent from the physical classroom at random points during the semester. Perusall allows students to engage with course content and each other asynchronously online.

I found it easy to set up Perusall by following these basic instructions (on my campus, Perusall has been administratively connected to all Canvas course shells, so there is no need for individual faculty members to install the LTI app). This brief explanatory video was also helpful. Perusall’s user interface is very intuitive. I set up the course’s article library and associated Canvas assignments in only a few minutes. Here is the end result from the Perusall side:

Notice how the layout is exactly what is shown in the video. It is also the same as what students will see.

Perusall uses an algorithm to machine grade student interaction with each document in the course library, and the algorithm’s output can be synced back to the Canvas gradebook. This means readings can become auto-graded Canvas assignments. Details on this and more are in the instructions I linked to above.

I will report on how well all of this has worked once the semester is underway.

Other posts in this series:

Perusall 2

Perusall 3

Perusall 4

Perusall 5

Perusall 6