Happy New Year! 🎉  We are excited to announce that we have new features available in the Perusall platform today. If you are interested in learning more about these new features, we invite you to join our free Academy webinar series starting January 13th and running through March 13th.

Scoring & rubrics

Reusable scoring templates: You are now able to define scoring templates in one place and then apply each scoring template to multiple assignments at once. For example, you might want to use different scoring settings for journal articles vs textbook chapters vs videos.

Reusable rubrics: Assignments using rubrics now offer the option of having a single rubric applied to multiple assignments at once.

Peer review assignment enhancements

Fishbowl assignments: We have heard that many instructors want to put a particular spin on peer review assignments and want to run activities where specific students are tasked with submitting work without reviewing others, while the rest of the class provides feedback on those submissions. The assignment concludes with the original submitters responding to comments on their work. With our new assignment type, you can now create these “fishbowl assignments" in your courses, which otherwise work similarly to peer review assignments.

Add a late submission deadline for partial credit
In peer review assignments, you can optionally add a late submission deadline for students to submit work late, for partial credit. Late work is only assigned to be reviewed by other late submitters, to avoid penalizing students who submit work on time.

Omit specific feedback periods
You can optionally omit the instructor review period (a time when instructors can review feedback before it is shown to the original authors) and omit the request for students to provide an overall feedback comment about the work they are reviewing.

Assignment improvements

Instructor review assignments: We are also bringing the social experience to the revision process with instructor’s review of student drafts of peer review assignments to traditional assignments where students submit their work for instructor review. With “instructor review assignments”, students will be able to submit work, the instructor will apply a rubric to score it and provide overall feedback, and the student can then be required to reply to the instructor reviews.

Reading, watching, or listening to the end: The “Reading to the end” scoring component in Perusall’s automatic scoring now becomes “Reading, watching, or listening to the end” – you can optionally track how much of a video or podcast has been watched or listened to, in addition to tracking reading progress in text-based material.

Default assignment instructions:  If you want students to see the same instructions for each assignment, you can now set default assignment instructions for your course. You can still add assignment-specific instructions when setting up an assignment which will override the course default.

Reuse quizzes: A single quiz can be assigned multiple times and scored separately each time it is assigned. For example, this can be a survey that you want to administer multiple times per semester, or a set of reading questions that you would like students to answer after every reading.

Course management & setup

Flexible TA permissions: We recognize that you often have different expectations about the role of your teaching assistants, and now we’re making it possible for you to customize what TAs can and cannot do in your course (e.g., view comments across groups, view and/or assign grades, edit the course, etc).

Streamlined course setup: Based on feedback this past fall, we are continuing to improve our course setup wizard. We made some changes to streamline the process and added an option to upload the syllabus for a course. Automatically populating certain aspects of the course set-up process will save time and having the option to upload the syllabus will make it easier to assign this core document as a first assignment.

As always, thanks for your continued support of Perusall. And let us know how we can support your work; please don’t hesitate to reach out to us anytime at support@perusall.com.

Cheers to another great year of learning!

The Perusall Team

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