Perusall
Cost: Perusall is
completely free when instructors upload their own materials (e.g. PDFs)
into the platform. They also offer 400,000 book titles from leading
publishers for purchase through the platform.
What it is: Perusall (www.perusall.com) is a “social e-reader"
developed primarily by instructors at Harvard who were
trying to solve the problem of student engagement with reading. They recognized
that only around 20-30 percent of their students were doing the readings, and
they did not want to resort to reading quizzes that neither learners nor
instructors enjoy. With Perusall, they set about to reimagine classroom
reading with three aims:
· Make reading a collective, social experience instead of a solitary
endeavor.
· Change education so that all students do the reading and come to
class prepared and motivated.
· Advance behavioral science and AI research in the service of
advancing education.
So how does it work? Instructors can set up a class space
in Perusall into which they can upload any course materials that they
have copyright access to (generally anything apart from books). Students are
then able to annotate the documents together, adding comments or
questions to the text and in threads to each other as they read. This
creates a live text experience for students, opening up possibilities
for rich conversation of the text both in and out of class
time itself.
The developers have found that with Perusall around 90
percent of their students do the readings each week. With Perusall,
students can be intrinsically, socially motivated as well as extrinsically
motivated by graded participation based on the quality of
their engagement. The developers have found that classroom
interactions are moved to a higher level because of student engagement
in Perusall.
Integration with Brightspace: Perusall integrates with Brightspace. This means
that the student enrollment for each class can be sent directly from
Brightspace to Perusall, giving your students direct access to the course
in Perusall. Students would not need to create an account
with Perusall, but could enter it directly from Brightspace. Additionally,
if desired,
grades can sent from Perusall to Brightspace. To
set this up, go to the area in Brightspace content where you would like to add
a Perusall link. Then, under "Existing Activities," click on
"External Learning Tools." You will find a link for Perusall 1.3.
When you click that, a link will be added to your Brightspace page.
You
can also set up assignments in Perusall and link directly to those assignments.
To do so, create the assignment in Perusall, then, in Brightspace under
"Existing Activites," you can find "Perusall Assignment
Link." When you click that, you will be able to select from the
Assignnment list at the top. This will add the direct assignment link into
Brightspace.
How to use it (instructors): Perusall claims that it takes about 15 minutes for an
instructor to set up a session for their semester. Once the basic session
is set up, instructors can add (drag and drop) course readings
that they have the rights to (e.g. syllabus, e-reserves, biblical
texts, web pages, word documents, etc.). Instructors can also set up
separate groups so that, for example, precepts read the texts together instead
of alongside the entire class. In the text, yellow highlights represent
comments by students and blue highlights represent comments by the instructor.
Instructors can also star comments for later review, and both instructors and
students can add private notes to the document as well. Here’s more
detailed information about how to get set up in Perusall: Instructor
help for Persall.
How to use it (students): When students enter the course session in Perusall,
they will be able to read their assigned readings and annotate the texts with
their peers. They can comment on the text itself or can reply to another
student's comment or question as part of a longer thread (discussion).
Here’s more detailed information about the student experience
in Perusall: Student
help for Perusall.
Frequently Asked Questions (from the Perusall Terms of
Service)
What are my rights over content I post to Perusall?
You retain complete control over your content. If instructors
request that their courses be completely deleted, we do not retain any
information, including posts, from them. Instructors have complete control over
the content displayed and can remove the content of any post at any time.
Are my class' annotations accessible via a search engine?
No, your class' annotations are not available or accessible via
search engines.
Is content I copy to Perusall accessible by anyone
outside of my class?
No. The only people who can see content posted by instructors, or
posts written by students, are those given access by the instructor. If you
have permission to distribute content to your students, you may distribute this
information through Perusall. No one else will see it.
Students who do an especially good job of writing annotations may,
in special cases, be given the option of sharing a small number of their (high
quality) annotations with other classes using the same reading material, as a
way of sparking conversation in those classes. If students give such
permission, the information is de-identified before using in other classes.
Can I use Perusall for purposes outside of
classes?
Yes, Perusall has been used successfully to obtain
feedback on your written work or to give students feedback on their work.
Businesses may also use Perusall for teaching training courses.