Perusall

Perusall is a social eTextbook platform which allows students to collectively read, annotate and discuss the readings uploaded by teaching staff.

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What is Perusall?

Perusall is a social reading platform available to students as an integration into the LMS. Perusall allows students (and teaching staff) to digitally annotate readings (with text, links, and embedded content). Readings can include access to chapters or sections on an eTextbook that students purchase or copyright compliant readings that you can upload. You can provide students with eTextbooks by:

  1. Accessing Perusall via the LMS (see instructions below).
  2. Going to the Documents tab.
  3. Clicking + Add>>Textbook.
  4. Searching the Perusall catalogue of available titles.
  5. Clicking on desired textbook and then clicking Request Title.

As a subject coordinator you can also upload copyright compliant or creative licensed readings to your Perusall subject, so students have access to a suite of materials. See copyright guidelines for using published materials in the LMS.

Students' annotations on the readings lets them create threads by highlighting text passages and posting questions or comments in the margin. The platform uses natural language processing (NLP) writing analytics to automatically evaluate student annotations.

Perusall allocates marks to students by running an algorithm over their contributions to discussions on readings. These marks can assist staff when marking Perusall activities as part of low stake formative assessment, but staff are responsible for ensuring all marking is fair and appropriate

The algorithm assesses the depth of an annotation along with the distribution of a student’s annotations across the text. Simplistic annotations focused around a couple of pages or passages will get a lower mark, while more complex and detailed annotations distributed across the reading will get higher marks. Perusall's engagement score allows multiple measures of student engagement to be aggregated into one single mark. Up to six different engagement metrics can be combined into this mark.

Perusall also provides data around student reading and annotation patterns. For example, the analytics can display students’ viewing time, active reading time and annotation numbers. Perusall produces a simple ‘confusion report’ around a set reading that highlights passages that students misunderstood, disagreed with each other about, or were most engaged with.

Important: Only copyright compliant materials can be used with Perusall.
Copyright in Australia is different from the US where Perusall is based. As such the information on their website may not be accurate for Australia. See the copyright guidelines for using published materials in LMS activities for instructions on how to determine if a resource can be used with Perusall.

Teaching and learning applications

As a collaborative reading platform Perusall can be used:

  • To foster engagement by students collaborating and discussing readings
  • To build a sense of community among the student cohort
  • As a hurdle task for students to demonstrate engagement with the subject material.

It can also be used for low stake formative assessments.

For more on teaching and learning with Perusall see social annotations.

Access and licensing

The University of Melbourne has a licence for Perusall, however, any textbooks used in the Perusall interface will require the student to purchase the textbook.

Follow the steps below to access Perusall yourself and give students access to it in your LMS subject. You cannot access Perusall from their main website.

Getting started

To add a Perusall link to your LMS subject which will give students access to all the Perusall assignments for your subject:

  1. Go to your LMS subject.
  2. Click on Settings in the subject menu.
  3. Go the Navigation tab.
  4. Drag Perusall from the ‘hide from students’ list to where you want it placed in the subject navigation area.
  5. Click Save.
  6. Click on Perusall in the subject navigation.
  7. Agree to the Privacy Policy.
  8. Set up your Perusall course following the getting started guide.

Students do not need to be added into the Perusall course/subject as your students will automatically be added when they click on the Perusall link from the LMS subject.

We strongly recommend that you set the Enrolment Estimate and Target Groups Size for your Perusall course/subject once the Census date has passed and enrolment numbers are stable. Do not set up any readings or textbooks before this setting is populated correctly. Setting are found under: Settings>>Grouping. This will ensure you have more balanced groups.

Perusall as formative assessment

There is an option for creating a Perusall assignment in the LMS and having grades passed back from pass back to the LMS Gradebook. Please use this feature with caution as we are still assessing the reliability of the Perusall grade passback feature. Subjects need more than 20 students using Perusall for the grade pass back feature to become available.

University of Melbourne resources

Vendor guides