Perusall is a social learning platform designed to boost student engagement with course material. It functions like a collaborative e-reader with annotation tools, allowing students to review and discuss assigned content together online.

• Replace traditional discussion boards with a more student-friendly interface that alleviates your grading load

• Hold your students accountable for engaging with content outside the classroom

• Encourage asynchronous interaction between students

• See a deeper level of cognitive engagement with content

Connect to Perusall from Blackboard

Follow the instructions on Adding Publisher and other Third Party Tools from the Content Market in Blackboard Ultra to access Perusall to your Blackboard course.

Clicking on the Perusall LTI will bring you to Perusall’s platform where you can manage your class and add new assignments. Select the plus sign to add a link to your Perusall class directly from Blackboard for your students.

Open

Navigating Perusall

Access Perusall by opening the tool through the Content Market in any Ultra course.

• Select Settings to set your preferences about how students will be grouped and how their work will be scored.

• Select Gradebook to access your gradebook. Perusall will automatically suggest grades based on the quality of students' work. Learn more about how scoring works

• Select Student View to see how students will view your Perusall course.

• Students receive notifications when a classmate has answered a question of theirs, or someone @-mentions them in a comment.

• Students can take private notes that incorporate their own writing with snippets from the readings. Notes are private by default; students can share them with classmates if desired.

• Group or one-on-one chats enable collaboration outside of a particular assignment.

  • Open group chats are available to the whole class and can be created only by instructors: use them for discussion about a particular aspect of the course, like a project or problem set. Private group chats can be created by students or instructors: students can use them to collaborate without having to share their personal contact information. The special Announcements group chat is where you can post course announcements.

  • One-on-one chats enable direct conversation between any two course members (students or instructors). Consider encouraging students to contact you via one-on-one conversations in Perusall to organize your course communications and cut down on email!

• Hashtags help connect ideas across conversations. Add hashtags to a comment by typing # and selecting from the list of tags below; instructors and students can also create new hashtags by simply adding a #tag to a comment. Click on any hashtag to view all comments tagged with that particular hashtag.

• Select Help to access Perusall's knowledge base and connect with Perusall Support.

When you first launch Perusall, you can access a guided tour showing you were to access all of these features. In case you missed it, we've recorded the tutorial here: