Overview

Perusall is a social learning platform that prepares students for class. The platform incorporates a novel e-book reader with collaborative annotation tools to ensure students learn more, come to class prepared, and become more engaged in the learning experience.

Perusall Upgrade to v1.3 (Sept 2023)

Roster Sync
- Upon the first time an instructor launches their Perusall course, their entire LMS course roster is available under the Students tab within their Perusall course and is updated each time the instructor launches Perusall.
Improved Grade Sync
- Instructors no longer need to build assignment-specific links with case-sensitive titles in order to sync grades. In fact, students just need to click at least one Perusall link in your LMS course (at least once), and we will be able to sync all of their grades from the course.

What happens to the 1.1 Course Content and student work?

Perusall is not able to transfer student work from one course to another, but instructors and students can still see previous coursework by logging in to Perusall.com directly, and accessing the previous course from their list of courses, or by clicking My Courses from within another Perusall course.

Enable Perusall

Open your Canvas course site

Click on Settings > Navigation
Scroll down the page to locate Perusall 1.3
Click on the "options" menu next to Perusall 1.3
Click on Enable
Click Save

Course Setup

Click on Perusall in your left hand navigation to begin course set up
Your students will populate into the roster when they click on a Perusall link in your course.
More Info

Customize your course policies

Navigate to Settings > General to set overall course policies about assignment availability and scoring.
Navigate to Settings > Grouping to manage discussion groups. Learn more about groups
Navigate to Settings > Scoring to determine how Perusall will generate engagement scores.
Navigate to Settings > Advanced to adjust fine-grained course options.
Add a TA by first adding the student in Canvas under People, then after the TA clicks on Perusall to join the class, you'll be able to promote them under Settings >Access.

Add readings and content to your course

To give assignments, you must first add readings and content to your course site through Perusall.

Click on Library on your course home page.
To add a book from Perusall's catalog, click Add > Textbook.
To upload a reading (PDF or EPUB format) from your computer, click Add > Documents from my computer or Add > Documents from Dropbox.
To add a web page as a reading, click Add > Web page.
See documentation for more information on adding other types of materials.

Add an Assignment

Click on Assignments on your course home page.
Click Add assignment and select the document you want to assign.
Select the part of the document to assign, specify a deadline, and click Save changes. Learn more about managing assignments
Make sure your assignment name is unique. Perusall assumes that assignments with the same name are being assigned to different students and will merge those assignments into a single column in your Gradebook, which will lead to unexpected results if that is not your intention.
Need to give an extension? Here's how to change deadlines for individual students.

Peer Review Assignments

Perusall can be used for Peer Review Assignments by combining student upload folders and differentiated assignments.

Grading

Setting up Gradebook sync

You can sync grades in Canvas with Perusall Assignments. You can either sync assignment scores as an "average" of all Perusall Assignments into a single gradebook column in Canvas, or sync individual assignments. More information on Grading and Syncing Grades with Canvas.

Create your Assignment(s) in Persuall
Set up a new External Tool assignment in Canvas and select Perusall from the list of apps.
1. 1. Create new Assignment. Choose External Tool from the Submission Type dropdown menu > Select Perusall from the list > Check off load this tool in a new tab)
Give the assignment in Canvas the same name as the assignment in Perusall; there is an option on the dropdown menu for each assignment in Perusall (called “copy full title to LMS”) that will copy the assignment name to the clipboard so you can paste it into Canvas.
Then students can launch directly into that assignment inside Perusall from Canvas.
Once you release the grades for a particular assignment, Perusall will send the grades for that assignment back to gradebook. Grades are synced to Canvas about once an hour, so it may take an hour or two for a grade update to be reflected in Canvas.

Viewing and Modifying Scores

View these scores by navigating to the Gradebook.
Within the gradebook, click on a score to reveal additional details about how the score was computed.
Use the pencil icon to manually override or enter a grade for a student.
Students will not see their scores until you "release" them. Release scores for an assignment by clicking the button at the bottom of that column, or enable automatic grade release within Settings > General.
More detailed information on grading standards: How Scoring Works in Perusall

Questions?

Perusall maintains documentation and offers support here for faculty and students. They also offer live webinars on using Perusall at a basic and advanced level.

You can also email us anytime at atc-ttl@wpi.edu with questions or to request a training.