Perusall Exchange®

In this session learn how we conquered the challenge of rolling out Perusall at Pima Community College. The Academic Learning Technologies (ALT) Team, or ALT Avengers, used our diverse skills, from strategic planning to technical expertise, ensuring success. Informed by pilot survey findings, we meticulously planned, executed, and evaluated our strategy to maximize engagement. In the pre-launch phase, careful planning and promotion set the stage. Post-launch, 121 hours of instruction enhanced faculty proficiency. Our journey resulted in increased usage, robust support, and stronger collaboration. Join us to discover the power of careful rollout planning in driving your Perusall adoption.

The AI Institute for Teachers held at the University of Mississippi in July 2023 and in January 2024 helped enhance AI literacy for over 80 faculty across disciplines. The curriculum provided hands-on experience with generative AI tools for text, images, audio, and video, while critically exploring ethical implications like bias and academic integrity challenges. Participants gained pragmatic skills in prompt engineering, using AI writing assistants and reading tools, speech recognition applications, and building chatbots. With AI rapidly advancing sustainable professional development initiatives are crucial for equipping educators to responsibly integrate AI capabilities that can promote creativity and quality learning experiences.

We introduce a novel type of assessment that allows for efficient grading of higher order thinking skills. In this assessment, a student reviews and corrects a technical memo that has errors in its formulation or process. To overcome the grading challenges imposed by essay-type responses in large undergraduate courses, we provide a Visual Basic for Applications Excel tool for instructors, ensuring efficient grading of student submissions. We report our experience using it in a multisection introductory business analytics course over several years and present survey-based evidence indicating that students perceive it to be clear and beneficial for learning.

This presentation will introduce three simple yet transformative questions that educators can ask themselves while creating lessons, activities, and assessments. Attendees of this video session will be provided with inspiration for creating non-disposable learning materials that are fun, meaningful, and invite ethical use of generative AI. All academic disciplines welcome!

Both a challenge and an opportunity, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) forces us to rethink our assessment practices. If the misuse of GenAI means students aren’t benefitting from certain formative assessments, do we give them up? Or can we find a better way forward? In this session, a college physics teacher discusses her struggles and successes dealing with the increasing misuse of GenAI. As part of a multipronged approach, an activity is shared that is designed to help students better understand the effects of using vs. misusing ChatGPT and other GenAI for formative writing tasks such as Perusall.

In the last couple of years, technology has evolved rapidly. As educators, we need to adapt and change accordingly. Putting learning into practice makes it fun, increases the involvement from participants and provide them chances to use what they have learned in a more applied manner. It is interesting to apply the experiential learning for students based on generative AI. We can start changing our assessments strategies to leverage generative AI as a learning tool.

The author has recently developed an Open Education Resource (OER) textbook utilizing ChatGPT. The textbook is currently being employed alongside Perusall in an Information Systems course at the graduate level. This presentation will outline the obstacles faced and the most effective methods uncovered when utilizing generative AI to produce an OER textbook.

This paper proposes hybrid intelligence as a strategy for collaborative learning experiences in Perusall discussions and assessments. This partnership would integrate faculty expertise with language models like ChatGPT for generating inclusive question banks aligned with Bloom’s taxonomy to reduce faculty workload. This alliance strives to curate authentic assessments and encourage critical thinking. This framework would promote faculty-facilitated question creation and students’ responsible use of AI in crafting reflective responses. The authors argue this streamlined approach improves the quality of students’ contribution to assignments while providing them with skills for navigating the future of an AI-enhanced workforce.

This presentation reports my experience and recommendations on teaching generative AI to enhance learners’ creativity, develop critical thinking, and introduce unexpected uses for these new technologies. Since 2023, I have taught students ways to use generative AI in undergraduate courses at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. I will share details about assignment parameters, in-class processes, and work outcomes in this session. Participants will gain insights into how they can integrate generative AI use into their assignments at multiple stages of the problem-solving process in any discipline.

Social annotation capitalizes on a natural inclination to annotate, and then it makes insights shareable. Assessment of reading comprehension can take many different forms (templates, quizzes, reports), but those tend to be isolated products. Qualitative feedback from students on both traditional reading assessment and annotation approaches could help inform future teaching strategies. Quantitative measurement of annotation can establish baselines for a given course routine. In this brief video presentation, social annotation is compared to a traditional reading assessment template as a content learning tool, and two social annotation platforms (Perusall and hypothes.is) are contrasted on multiple output measures.

The artful balance between encouraging students’ motivation to learn and simultaneously discouraging gaming our heuristics is tricky. Studies have helped us “understand the factors that may explain students’ enhanced motivation and affect with collaborative digital learning using social annotative tools (SA)” (Li and Li, 2021, p. 1). Perusall’s synchronization with learning management systems (LMS) and its ability to customize scoring might offer promise for achieving balance. Perusall can offset rewards for heuristics and customize scoring for assignments. This paper includes helpful resources for customizing scoring settings, steps for exporting data from Perusall, and a customizable template for semester data management to help inform your data-driven decisions for determining assignment weights.

Bridging or narrowing the gap between actual and desired reading instruction is not achieved by practice as usual; game changers are needed. The purpose of this case study presentation is to report on how we use Perusall to ensure that students comply with reading requirements, how we use the video function to provide discussion and feedback on practical tasks, and how we facilitate a professional learning community among teacher educators, pre-service teachers and mentor teachers situated across the country.

Driving retention with active learning sounds easy. It isn’t. I have been working on replacing large lecture with a team based/project based approach for 10 years now but total sucess is elusive. Removing exams and replacing assessment with mastery grading has become one of the cornerstones of this approach. This presentation will provide an example of one way to approach mastery grading of a team based project based course with about 80 engineering students. Parallel efforts to take advantage of the diversity in the class and use undergrads as Inclusion Ambassadors to drive inclusion is also discussed.

This session explores the use of ‘choice’ and social interaction to promote and sustain student engagement in hybrid learning environment. In particular, we discuss our innovative technique designed to offer choice in learning through various content delivery methods, supported by opportunities for social interactions (formal or informal) and collaborative learning. During our session, we explore the implementation of this innovative technique in a graduate-level course, share students’ responses to this learning experience, and consider lessons learned for future teaching delivery in graduate courses.

Situated within the context of teacher education, this presentation examines the role and strategy use of an instructor adopting a ‘feedback as dialogue’ approach on Perusall. Using Perusall as a pedagogic tool to model feedback practices, it discusses how student-teachers are engaged in different phases of a course: in pre-course co-construction of a negotiated curriculum, in critical peer-reviewing of analyses of textbook materials and classroom excerpts during the course, and in assessment and feedback literacy development in the post-course stage. It highlights the impact of collaboration annotation in engendering formative assessment through making thinking processes visible and feedback timely.

The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of learning communities on student engagement and academic achievement. A mixed-methods research design will be used, including surveys, interviews, and observation. The sample will consist of 50 students enrolled in 10 learning communities at a large, urban university. Quantitative data will be analyzed using descriptive statistics and regression analysis, while qualitative data will be analyzed using a thematic analysis approach. The study is expected to contribute to the understanding of effective learning communities and inform the design of technology-mediated learning environments.

How can course design and assessment support collaborative learning and transferable skills, especially in large “lecture” classes? We discuss preliminary results from a collaborative research-practice self-study partnership focusing on Sealfon’s implementation of learner-centered approaches in a 200-student first-semester algebra-based physics course with labs. The course design followed the two intentionalities of the Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE) approach (Brookes, Etkina, and Planinsic 2020): (1) We want students to learn physics by thinking like physicists, through engaging in knowledge-generating activities and using physics reasoning tools. (2) Learning physics should enhance students’ well-being.

Unlike traditional grading systems rooted in systemic inequalities like norm-referenced and criterion-referenced grading, alternative grading favors holistic and continuous forms of assessment and feedback. Studies show that traditional grading systems often play on students’ fear of punishment, lessens their intrinsic motivation and performance, and increases their desire to outcompete peers (Schinske & Tanner, 2017). The Fostering Inclusive Classrooms Through Alternative Grading session will focus on how alternative grading methods such as specifications grading, contract grading, and ungrading encourages students to think critically about their own learning, creates collaborative partnerships between student and instructor, and complements equitable teaching practices.

This presentation explores the potential of using ChatGPT, a large language model developed by OpenAI, in language education and how it can engage the audience and improve their language proficiency. ChatGPT is a powerful tool that can provide personalized & interactive language practice for students, as well as understand & respond to natural language inputs. Participants will learn about the basics of ChatGPT, its practical usage, its limitations, and how it can be useful for both instructors & students. It also provides examples of how ChatGPT can be integrated into existing language courses and activities, and how it can supplement traditional language teaching methods.

This video presentation explores how the A&S Office of EdTech introduced social annotation exercises in Perusall to aspiring and new higher education instructors, current graduate and Ph.D. students, with the ultimate goal of encouraging them to leverage active learning technologies in pedagogically informed ways. By create exercises in Perusall and enrolling aspiring/new instructors as students, they were able to experience the social annotation experience from the student perspective and were subsequently able to grasp the potential application for these types of exercises in their own instruction.