Perusall launched in 2015 as a free collaborative e-book reading platform to help students complete readings and increase student engagement with readings. For instructors, completion of readings is necessary for student discussion and active learning activities for in-person but also online courses. However, research of undergraduate students has consistently shown that students often do not complete assigned readings before class for varied reasons ranging from time management to reading comprehension issues (Hoeft, 2012). Increasing reading compliance is an enduring challenge for many instructors not only in the humanities and social sciences but also in STEM disciplines. By having students highlight and annotate text, Perusall aims to build a community of inquiry through a written dialogue between peers and between instructor and students. Students can closely read texts as well as discuss big picture connections to course themes and learning objectives.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, to encourage students to prepare readings for class sessions, I relied on reading quizzes and graded annotation assignments for in-person classes and traditional online discussion boards in Blackboard for online courses. The challenges of teaching exclusively online both synchronously and asynchronously during the pandemic pushed me to experiment with online apps like Perusall. Perusall is not the only free annotation app available, but it has several features that have set it apart, which I will discuss below. I began using Perusall in Fall 2020 in my POL 101 American Government course and I required students to post close reading original annotations and peer discussion replies. I have continued to use Perusall in my online courses. Based on my experiences and observations, I have summarized important considerations and features for faculty who may want to adopt Perusall for their in-person or online courses.
Focus on a Student Learning Objective
Students must understand the specific learning objective of using Perusall in your course. For example, if instructors are using Perusall to enhance online discussions, instructors must be clear about the length, content, and content expectations for discussion posts. As with traditional discussion boards, Perusall is not immune to filler or repeat posts without specific instructions to combat those kinds of responses. If instructors are using Perusall for guided reading of articles or close reading, instructors should be upfront about the reading skills they are asking students to learn. Then they should decide on strategies to help students practice that skill such as: (1) sign post the readings with instructor annotations, (2) assign roles to students like thesis explainer, evidence finder or question asker, or (3) require students to identify specific items like variables or theories in the text and explain why. While Perusall can be used in many ways, I would recommend sticking to one student learning goal for using Perusall, whether it’s discussion or developing note-taking skills to minimize student perceptions that Perusall is another venue for busy work.
Grading
Perusall has a popular autograding feature. The default settings are adjustable and instructors can override any autograde or disable autograding altogether. The autograde algorithm considers a weighted set of specific metrics like quality, minimum number threshold, on time annotations, distribution of annotations, or upvoting by other students. While I use the autograding feature (in my course: quality, on-time, sentence minimums, and distribution), I also manually review all student grades because I have Thursday/Sunday deadlines each week for discussion and Perusall can only accommodate single deadlines. I found that adjusting the autograding feature was the most complicated aspect of using Perusall.
I also provide students with a grading rubric with samples of full credit posts as well as no credit or partial credit posts. With the newest developments in AI, Perusall also audits students’ annotations and flags annotations for instructors that copy other students or are cut and pasted from other sources. More recently, I have found the increasing use of word-spinning tools to re-summarize the text with synonym replacement and in my grading rubric, those posts would not earn credit.
Other Key Features
1. Beyond Readings: Perusall started as an e-reading platform but has expanded to videos, audio, visuals, equations, Word and Google documents and spreadsheets, PDFs, PPTs, and Google slides. I have used Perusall for documentary films, podcasts, even the course syllabus.
2. Analytics: Perusall provides activity metrics for each student. Instructors can see if a student: opened the assignment, read to the end, duration of active engagement time, received peer responses, and upvoting. The duration and reading to the end metrics have been important for me to assess student course progress and to help students diagnose gaps in their preparation for a quiz or exam. Perusall also automatically generates a student confusion report for each assignment. It summarizes the top areas of confusion or engagement, and the best student annotations based on quality and peer engagement. I have used these to jump start a class discussion or to recap the end of a unit.
3. Quizzes: Instructors can add quizzes as a knowledge check to any assignment. Multiple choice, numerical, short answer and short essay format questions can be created within Perusall. For extra credit, I have used these for textbook chapter knowledge checks in addition to regular annotations. Generally, students who take the quiz and do well are the same students who complete the readings. I have not yet included it in regular grading for Perusall.
4. Social Features: Perusall can assign students to groups randomly based on group size set by the instructor. Students can also like or upvote other student posts. I have found that changing groups for online discussion helps students get to know each other over the course of the semester. Some students used to social media likes, will use upvote function for student posts they agree with, or they find helpful, which also helps build a classroom community online.
References:
Hoeft, Mary E. (2012) “Why University Students Don’t Read: What Professors Can Do To Increase Compliance,” International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Vol. 6: No. 2, Article 12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.20429/ijsotl.2012.060212
Helen Chang
Dr. Chang is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Behavioral and Social Sciences department at Hostos. She is a political scientist with research interests in election rules and reforms, the intersection of social-technical systems in election administration, migration patterns and generational variations in voting behavior, and teaching and learning on political science.
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