Promote Active Learning and Authentic Discussion with Perusall

Are you looking to make your course readings more engaging?  Are you looking for improved ways for your students to collaborate and learn together? Consider using the tool Perusall, now available for all ASU courses.

Perusall is a collaborative annotation tool for readings that allows for discussion, comments, and questions as students are learning the content.

It’s a great way to promote active learning through on-topic peer collaboration, to make readings more engaging (and ensure that students logged in and read the material), and address student confusion quickly and easily.

For hybrid courses, consider asking your students to read, annotate, and discuss your learning materials before coming to class so you can collect everyone’s thoughts and take it a step deeper in-person. For fully-online courses, you can use Perusall to have authentic discussions around the content with the ability to ask and answer questions as students are learning the material similar to how a student would raise their hand in an in-person lecture to address misunderstanding or curiosity.

Two really great things about Perusall

1. It’s integrated with Canvas so students don’t need a separate account or website to use it, plus all grades can be automatically transferred to the Canvas gradebook for graded activities.
2. It’s free to use in courses that use copyright-free PDFs, public domain, or OER materials. For courses with published textbooks, students only pay for the cost of the ebook with no cost to the institution.

Watch the following faculty overview for an in-depth look at Perusall:

Perusall - Faculty Overview video

Interested in using Perusall? 

Here are three more videos that may be helpful for you:

• How to integrate Perusall with Canvas
• How to re-integrate Perusall with Canvas after a course copy to a new term
• Student overview of Perusall (you may want to make your own custom version of this)

Guest blogger: 

Dr. Brendan Lake is an instructional designer for Arizona State University Online, where he consults faculty on technology and learning design for programs including biological sciences, biochemistry, organizational leadership, interdisciplinary studies, music, and others.