Perusall for social reading

Perusall offers an online environment (hosted by the company or through an LMS) that allows the annotation of pdfs and Word documents. The pdfs are either content the instructor has the rights to use in a course or digital textbooks from companies that sell their content through Perusall. By environment I mean that the service allows an instructor to create courses, assign readings to these courses, sign up students, and check on student use of the assigned readings linked to a grade book if desired.

I place Perusall in a unique category of the multiple layering services I have reviewed because of its collaboration with multiple textbook companies. The opportunity to assign a traditional textbook for layering activities is unique as far as I know. The examples I was able to locate indicate a focus on higher education. I also saw that some instructors had assigned journal articles with the copyright warning you see when you get the library to print a journal article for you. I am unclear on the copyright issues associated with the distribution of journal articles as pdfs which I always assumed was different from having each student using their own library account to download journal pdfs. Again, the opportunity to read a pdf and few the annotations of others requires a common source not available when each student works on their own pdf.

The environment provided by Perusall is similar to that of InsertLearning. Perusall has optimized the way the annotation tool works to encourage a more social form of reading. As a reader, you will see highlighted text (one color for the instructor and a different color for other students). Clicking on an existing colored segment will reveal questions or comments. As a reader looking at existing highlights, you can indicate that you also have a similar question. The count of such questions offers instructors a way to identify topics that could be the focus of a class discussion.

To create a question or comment, the reader highlights text and then enters text (also links to web sites, documents). The system has a unique capacity to determine if readers have satisfied requirements for an assigned number of comments with some type of AI determining the quality of the comment. These can result in entries in a grade book if desired.

Perusall is presently free. It is unclear if this is the long-term business model if Perusall gets a cut when instructors assign a digital book available from several publishers through the system. Setting up a course, adding personal pdfs or Word documents as reading content, and using the system is free at this time.

Additional information for educators from Perusall.