As we approach the end of another remarkable year, we are thrilled to share our accomplishments and events from 2023. From insightful webinars to our new social learning features, we want to thank you for playing an integral role in shaping our year's success.

To kick-off our 2023 retrospective, here is a special note from Perusall co-founder and CTO, Brian Lukoff:

"As we approach the end of the year, I am filled with gratitude for your support and trust. Your enthusiasm for driving deeper student engagement and improving student learning is what motivates our team to build and support Perusall for you. Stay in touch: we love hearing from you -- whether it is sharing how you are using Perusall with your students, or how we can continue to improve it to meet your needs. Just hit reply and share your thoughts!

Your thoughtful and creative feedback continues to help us shape the platform, and we're excited to bring you exciting new features in 2024!"

Our Perusall team was busy this year creating new platform features for instructors and students. Take a look at some of our year’s highlights and discover how you can implement them into your courses today.

Click here for the full list of new features this year.

✏️ "Making the Most of Learning with Perusall" Social Learning Assignment

Our pre-built assignment, Making the Most of Learning with Perusall, helps introduce students to social learning and helps them learn how to write high-quality comments. This assignment is available in multiple versions: STEM, humanities, and the social sciences. You can add one of these assignments to your course by navigating to Assignments > Add > Making the most of Perusall.

Pro tip: This assignment is a great way to start off your course and onboard students new to Perusall!

🎉 Dynamic Feedback for Students

Have your students ever asked how they can improve their score in Perusall? Perusall will now proactively help students work towards a better score (and ultimately, more engagement and improved learning outcomes for them!) by nudging them with suggestions about what they can work on. Paige, our friendly Perusall mascot, is here to help!

💡 Use Generative AI to Suggest Discussion Prompts

Instructors can now use generative AI to get ideas for thought-provoking questions to pose to students.

Simply highlight the text you want to ask a question about and click Suggest a discussion prompt. Perusall provide you with a suggested question for students to respond to. You can choose to post the question as-is for students to see, edit it before posting, or discard it. (This tool will not be shown to students until you post it into your course.)

Pro tip: This suggestion prompt is a great way to kick off an engaging conversation based on the course text

We were excited to introduce the Perusall Academy, our Perusall training webinars designed to boost your pedagogy, to our community this year. In 2023, 2,036 registrants from 55 countries joined us in learning more about our social learning platform and became Perusall experts!

Curious to learn more about Perusall? Perusall Academy returns in January 2024. Register today!

As we look back at our year's successes, Perusall Exchange 2023 is one to remember! With 27 asynchronous presentations, 5 live events, and an engaging keynote speaker, Dr. Zeynep Tufekci, the Exchange inspired over 1,500 educators from all over the world with new innovative teaching ideas. Keep an eye out for our Perusall Exchange 2024 call for proposals and conference announcements!

🎙️ Social Learning Amplified hosted by Eric Mazur

Our Perusall podcast, Social Learning Amplified, is now in its second season! Thank you to all our guests for generously imparting their research insights, expertise, and innovative methods in fostering student engagement both within and beyond the traditional classroom setting. Additionally, thank you to all our listeners who have shared and subscribed to our podcast. We can't wait to share more episodes with you next year!

Listen now to Episode 14: A Look at Students’ Perceptions of Social Annotation with guest, Dr. Virginia Clinton-Lisell, University of North Dakota.

Listen here or wherever you find your podcasts!

🏆 Tips & Tricks from the Perusall Support Team!

Maggie, Success Manager:

"It can be especially helpful to communicate the following information to your students so they can hop into Perusall fully prepared."

• Highlight areas of the text, equations, or figures/graphs that are confusing and post a question about it.
• If you see questions that your classmates have posted that you can help answer, help them out! Explaining your thinking will help deepen your own understanding of the content.
• What most interests you, and why? Highlight areas of the text that spark your interest or curiosity — others may feel the same way!
• Are there opinions or conclusions in the text that you disagree with? Highlight these and explain why you disagree. Or follow up on a classmates’ post here: do you agree with your classmate? Why or why not?”

Leah, Success Specialist: “In the new audit feature you can hover over the “?” icon in the center column to see exactly what section of the comment was copy/pasted.”

Thank you for participating in a wonderful year with us! We extend our sincerest gratitude and appreciation. As you and your students continue to use Perusall, remember that we are here to provide you with support. Reach out to us at support@perusall.com for any questions or feedback.

Happy Holidays!