Perusall
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Perusall is an interactive social annotation platform designed to transform traditionally passive reading and content review into an active, collaborative learning experience.
Within Perusall, students engage directly with course materials—such as articles, textbook chapters, PDFs, videos and web pages—by highlighting text, asking questions and responding to one another in context. Rather than reading in isolation, students participate in ongoing academic conversations that promote critical thinking and knowledge construction. This approach encourages deeper engagement, improves comprehension and builds a community of inquiry within the course.
Perusall Key Features
- Social Annotation: Students can highlight text and add comments, questions and replies directly within the material.
- Multimedia Support: Assign readings, videos, podcasts and web content with built-in annotation tools.
- Threaded Discussions: Conversations remain anchored to specific passages to make dialogue more focused and meaningful.
- Automatic Grading: Perusall uses algorithms to evaluate the quality, quantity and timeliness of student engagement.
- Analytics Dashboard: Educators gain insight into reading behaviors, engagement levels and areas of confusion.
- LMS Integration: Seamlessly integrates Blackboard for easy rostering and grade syncing.
How To Use Perusall
Step 1: Access & Sync Perusall
- From Courses, open a course. Then select “View course & institution tools” under Books & Tools in the Details & Actions menu.
- Scroll down until you see a link titled “Browse all course tools.”
- Scroll down until you see Perusall (items are listed alphabetically).
- Click on Perusall. A new browser tab will open.
- Since this is your first time setting up Perusall, click “Link to Home Page” at the top of the screen. A link to Perusall will appear at the bottom of the home screen for your course.
- After syncing Perusall with your course, access Perusall from this link on your course home page.
Step 2: Update Settings in Perusall Course
- Click the Perusall link in your Blackboard course. A new browser tab will open.
- Since this is the first time setting up Perusall, it will open to the settings page, prompting you to set up the course in Perusall. Go to Perusall's Getting Started for Instructors help page and scroll down to “Course Set Up” for step-by-step instructions.
After Perusall is synced with your course, you may access it through the link in your course.
Step 1: Upload Content into Perusall Course Library
- Before you create Perusall assignments, you need to upload content into the Perusall library.
- Perusall accepts a variety of items into its library: documents, Web page, quiz, video, or podcast.
- Click Library at the top of the left-hand menu. Then click the Add Content button to add the desired item(s). Visit Perusall's Manage Course Library Content help page for more information.
Step 2: Create Assignments
- Click Assignments in the left-hand menu. Then click the Add Assignment button to create a Perusall assignment.
- Perusall offers a variety of assignment types. For the annotation assignment, select “Standard Assignment.
- A pop-up box will appear with the steps to follow.
- Visit the Create and Manage Assignments help page for detailed directions. Note: this help page will also provide instructions for adding the assignment link to your Blackboard course.
Step 3: Viewing Discussions and Creating Comments
- To view student work for a particular Perusall assignment, click the specific Perusall assignment link in your Blackboard course.
Step 4: Grading Perusall Assignments
- You can choose to use the Perusall auto-grading feature, or you can manually adjust scores before syncing grades to your Blackboard course.
- In Perusall, select Gradebook to see the column layout of all Perusall assignments and student grades.
- Visit Perusall’s Scoring and Grades help page for detailed directions.
Get Support
Schedule a one-on-one consultation if you would like to meet with a Delphi Center instructional designer to review your gradebook to make sure it is set up like you intend, or review the listed resources from Persuall.