What is Perusall? 

Students are expected to read and prepare prior to class to better engage in class discussions or activities. However, instructors might find it hard to motivate students to finish the readings and assess their understanding. With the recent discussion about ChatGPT and its direct impact on writing, the commonly used assignment “reading reflection” needs to be redesigned, for example, relating to student personal experiences to avoid the abuse of AI. Social annotation provides another alternative for students to engage with the content and exchange ideas in a learning community. 

Perusall is a social annotation tool that allows students to engage course content with their peers. This online platform nurtures a digital community, where instructors can assign the readings and the class can annotate and interact asynchronously. 

Get Started
Basic set-up

The Faculty Getting Started page maintained by Perusall provides step-by-step instructions to create course, add reading materials and videos, create assignments (*NEW: Peer review), manage groups, view discussions, and manage grades. If you have any specific question, feel free to check the FAQs or contact dku_ctl@dukekunshan.edu.cn.

Please note, Perusall’s synchronous integration with the Learning Management System (LMS) Canvas has not been set up. To embed Perusall in Canvas manually, click Settings in your Canvas course site >>  APPS >> Redirect Plus to insert Perusall homepage link (https://www.perusall.com/). Both the instructors and the students need to create their own Perusall accounts. 

Prepare your students for Perusall 

Perusall provides a Getting started page for students that explains how to enroll in a course, start a reading assignment, and interact with classmates. Instructors can share this website with students in the syllabus or at the beginning of the course.

It is equally importantly to set up a mock assignment for students to practice. For example, instructors may ask students to annotate the syllabus, so as to gather students’ feedback on course design and familiarize themselves with the tool.

Pedagogical Recommendations

Below are the pedagogical recommendations supplemented by DKU faculty’s suggestions from their teaching experiences. 

Design
  • Think through the goals and learning outcomes of the annotation activities, such as to develop students’ reading comprehension skills, to motivate them to complete pre-class readings, or to encourage meaningful pre-class discussion.
  • Develop clear expectations or share some expected behaviors in annotation activities, such as posting comments, asking questions, responding to each other, checking peers’ annotations constantly, etc.
  • Communicate with students the grading criteria if any, and clarify on the purpose that it is not designed for competition but interaction and engagement

 

  • You’re required to make a minimum of 10 substantive annotations on the Required Readings for each unit. You must spread these annotations out over at least 6 different readings.

  • Each individual annotation will be judged on a pass/fail basis. In order to count as passing, your Annotations must: 1) be 50-150 words in length. 2) clearly respond to the comment and/or be clearly connected to the cited text. Such a response can contain relevant additional media. 3) be on topic and within the scope of the conversation about the main question of the unit. 4) move the conversation forward in a productive way. This can include demonstrating what you’re confused about or interested in. 5) be your own contribution. It cannot merely repeat something that somebody already said in another annotation.

  • You can fulfill #3 and #4 in a variety of ways, from a strongly text-based approach that points out, for instance, two passages that may be in tension with each other, or argues a specific point against the text, to a strongly topic-based approach that uses what is in the text as a basis for expressing a point about the main question for the unit.

Figure 1. Prof. Ben Van Overmeire shared the grading criteria of ETHLDR 201 annotation assignments.  

Facilitate
  • Acknowledge students’ efforts and provide effective feedback on their writings instead of general comments such as “good discussion,” if time permits.
  • Read over students’ annotations even when automatic grading is applied. Students’ annotations can help instructors adjust the instructions and class discussions.
  • Maintain a high level of engagement by selectively discussing students’ comments in class.
Grade, Reflect & Store data properly
  • It’s not suggested to higly rely on Perusall’ automatic grading system. Alternatives mentioned by DKU faculty: 1) employ Pass/Fail or ungrading mechanism, 2) grade manually with references to grades on Perusall, 3) give outstanding students bonus, 4) set the total grade beyond 100% in Settings >> Scorings so that two or more grading components are dispensable
  • Reflect on the data in Analysis and consider to what degree students’ annotating patterns could feed back on the course design
  • Do not allow further distribution without the instructor’s permission. e.g., instructors can disable PDFs download with comments to keep the class discussion in the platform.
DKU Examples

Prof. Ben Overmeire: Perusall as a platform to raise questions in RELIG 101. He motivated students to signal what they feel confused about the readings on Perusall. He replied to easy, personal, and not-so-relevant-to-course-content questions on Perusall. He then selected annotations that 1) attracted a number of responses 2) students made mistakes while commenting 3) closely related to the core content of the texts, and brought them to in-class discussion. 

He reflected that social annotation empowered students with autonomy: Instead of a traditional Chinese approach that instructors decide on which facets they spend time on in class, students annotate and define which are the essential parts of the texts, tailoring the teaching to their needs.

Prof. Yitzhak Lewis: Perusall as an alternative to evaluate engagement. He graded students for comments and their interactions with other students, and he encouraged students’ steady reflections of the texts by applying no deadline for the assignments. He commented that Perusall is a more effective indicator to evaluate and motivate students’ participation than taking attendance:

  • Every students could get chance to participate in the discussion
  • Students had more spatiotemporal flexibility to participate in the discussion
  • The instructor had clearer record of which of, when, and how students engaged
What Students Say

Students praise annotating activities for the inclusive learning community that Perusall has fostered:

  • Graded activities on Perusall push students to read the materials more meticulously and interact with classmates more frequently. Traceable online discussions also inspire students’ essay writings.
  • Perusall connectd students form different geographical locations, especially during the pandemic. It also provides an alternative for introverted students to speak up and engage in discussions.
 

Students also criticize the unclear grading criteria, the auto grading feature, and the induced unhealthy competition: 

  • Unclear expectations for post numbers, word limit, and the content stir unhealthy competition for longer annotations, which increases students’ workload and exhausts their interests.
  • Students report that Perusall’s scoring parameters are not reliable indicators for faculty expectations or student reading behaviors. For example, students who read on iPad’s PDFs might be downgraded for not spending enough time on the platform.

  

Special Thank-you Note: this documentation was contributed by Yinger Yang as a CTL intern and Zhixian Zhang as a CTL student partner.