Perusall is a social e-reading platform allowing students and instructors to collaborate by annotating and discussing course materials.
Perusall Features:
Share and annotate documents (PDFs, Word documents from a computer, Dropbox, or Google Drive, Images, Videos, Podcasts, and Digital textbooks)
Give multimodal assignments
Sync grades to Canvas
Assess student progress
Important Resources
Instructor Guide
Perusall has created a guide just for instructors with numerous articles.
Student Guide
Perusall has created numerous support articles specifically for students.
Training & Support
Join one of our group training sessions, ask questions in an open lab setting, or schedule a one-on-one with our Instructional Accessibility Specialist for more guidance and troubleshooting issues with Perusall.
Frequently Asked Questions
Perusall supports instructors at institutions without a license who choose to use only free materials in their courses (such as instructor-provided PDFs, EPUBs, web pages, videos, podcasts, and images) by allowing instructors to choose an affordable fee for students to access the platform. Alternatively, instructors or departments may purchase bulk access for students.
During course setup, you will be prompted to choose a platform access fee which is totally up to the instructor. If you choose $0 you may be asked to spread the word about Perusall to colleagues. You can learn more about Perusall Costs here.
If you plan to integrate Perusall with your LMS, set up that integration first -- course creation in Perusall happens automatically the first time you launch Perusall from the course in your LMS. Once the course is created, you can copy documents and assignments over from a previous course, if desired, via Library > Add > Materials from another course.
If you plan to use Perusall standalone, you can create a new course using the Create course button on the Perusall home page (after logging in). Alternatively, you can clone a previous course using the Copy course button -- this will allow you to start from the skeleton of a previous course (minus the previous semester's student roster and student work) and simply adjust the deadlines or change materials from there.
If you would like to make a course a test or demonstration course. Go to settings > general, and scroll to the bottom to enable “This is a test or demonstration course”.
The test and demonstration course will then be separated from your live courses on the course home page.