Perusall is a social annotation web platform that allows us to have discussions about readings by commenting directly on the readings themselves. Each participation activity that involved reading and discussing something on Perusall will have a link to that document.

Goals of the Read & Discuss in Perusall Activities

We’re going to be covering a lot of material that can be very technical, esoteric, and difficult to engage with. Being able to share your questions and thoughts throughout a reading has several benefits, to you, for the other students, and for the instructors.

  • Ask and answer questions to clarify meaning and interpretation.
  • Share unique perspectives, experiences, and background knowledge.
  • Recognize specific pieces of text where readers may agree or disagree.
  • Get credit for the difficult-to-quantify effort of reading and thinking.

Accessing Perusall

Go to perusall.com, click Login, and then either log in using your Facebook, Twitter, or Google account, or create an account using your email address and password.

Select I am a student and enter the course code (available on the course page in Canvas).

Using Perusall

The main interaction you’ll have on Perusall is to highlight text in a reading that you want to make a comment or ask a question about. See instructions here.Links to an external site. You can also respond to other’s comments or questions in threaded replies and upvote comments you find helpful or agree with.

How the Activity is Scored

You receive a point for completing the activity as long as you add 4 high-quality comments and/or questions to a single article. Perusall includes a very handy customizable auto-grading feature that has been adjusted to respond to the expectations of the course. We also manually check credits that have been assigned to see if there are particular topics that the group might benefit from more in-depth discussion of.

We do not track time spent reading or the number of times you opened the file (feel free to download the pdf, read it elsewhere, and come back to add your comments/questions to the discussion). Replies to questions or comments of other students absolutely count, as long as they include some quality content (i.e. “I agree” isn’t enough). Click here to view examples of the kinds of comments you might expect to make.

Perusall is set up so that you should be able to view feedback on your engagement with each article, including your comments and whether you’ve received credit. To view the status of any assignment, click on My Scores in the left-side menu. You should see a number next to each assignment you’ve started - if I’ve set it up correctly, it’ll show a 0 if you’ve started but haven’t yet earned credit, and 1 once you’ve met the commenting goals. Click on the number to view details about your activity and score on that article.

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