Perusall Exchange®

If the Perusall Exchange has taught us anything, it's that social learning isn't just for students! We as faculty grow professionally and improve our teaching when we engage in social learning with each other. Perusall-based faculty learning communities allow us to extend the social learning experience beyond the annual Exchange. This session introduces strategies for facilitating faculty learning communities, reading groups, and communities of practice through Perusall. We outline a structure and offer strategies to encourage participant engagement throughout the social learning experience. Finally, we invite attendees to experiment with us by participating in a Perusall-based interdisciplinary, inter-institutional learning community.

In an upper-level course delivered in an asynchronous online environment, students generated unique projects about the biochemistry and molecular biology of human diseases. They uploaded recordings of ~15-minute oral presentations to the course Perusall website. Each .mp4 file was separately evaluated by two students and the instructor using a complementary rubric and Perusall tools in parallel. This process was repeated four times to encourage practice in and synergy between the creating, evaluating, and analyzing skill areas of Bloom’s taxonomy. This presentation provides evidence that the use of the Perusall platform was critical to the success of the course design.

The main aim of this video presentation is to lay out the challenges that designing a virtual "Food, Consumption, and Health" university Master degree poses to professors, researchers and designers from University of Oviedo's Food Sociology Research Group in Spain. The core of the presentation focuses on how the design team face these challenges and discuss to what extent the creation of a Process Coordinator helps facilitate engagement and networking in the online learning environment supported by the use of Perusall.

Although the extant literature is replete on the essence of inclusivity in higher education it is sparse on how instructors can be intentional in inclusivity through platforms like Perusall that aim at engaging diverse students in the classroom. This presentation focuses on features in Perusall that enhance the engagement of every learner, irrespective of their identity. The features are discussed within the three criteria of the Universal Design for Learning (multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representations, and c) multiple means of actions and expressions), which embody cultural competence to ensure diverse learners have access to knowledge through meaningful, challenging learning opportunities. Participants will identify other features in Perusall that can enhance inclusivity in the classroom.

Despite the call for change, passive teaching methods are common in medical education. Active learning can decrease cognitive load and positively impact long-term retention. Perusall was selected to support active learning activities and deliver preparatory materials to first-year medical students (n=125) in a basic science course. This strategy was compared to providing students with a pre-recorded lecture. The findings demonstrated that Perusall was effective in increasing engagement, motivating reading through social annotation and shared understanding, and ultimately enhancing academic performance in midterm and final exams.

As writing teachers grapple with the arrival of intelligence-assisted essay writing, Perusal offers writing classes a workspace to look closely at the syntactic decisions that AI writing applications make when attempting to write reflective essays about the human experience. In this demonstration of a teaching practice, we'll use Perusal to workshop an AI-generated essay to determine where AI falls short of capturing what it means to be human.

Service-Learning is a pedagogical approach which integrates meaningful service with academic content (National Youth Leadership Council, 2021). While the academic benefits of this approach to teaching have often been documented and emphasized (Billig et al., 2005), it is also important to note the vast social benefits. Indeed, the development of beneficial social learning communities in service-learning courses likely contributes to students’ academic achievement. This paper briefly reviews the evidence regarding the benefits of service-learning for building social learning communities and then explicates the theoretical, empirical, and practical links between these social learning benefits and academic outcomes.

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.

According to the American Statistical Association, students in introductory statistics courses should become critical consumers of statistically-based results reported in popular media. At the same time, the ability to critically understand empirical papers is crucial for economics majors as economics has become increasingly empirical in recent decades. In my Statistics I course, I use Perusall to assign both the readings of the relevant chapters of a free statistics textbook and the reading of empirical papers. When assigning the reading of academic papers, I provide reading prompts aligned to the learning outcomes of the textbook.

With the introduction of OpenAI's ChatGPT tool, educators face a new challenge in student writing: avoiding having a robot do students' homework for them. This presentation looks at how ChatGPT can be used to in essay writing and how to create assignments that prohibit students from being able to use the AI source to complete their homework assignment. In addition, the presentation considers how elements of good pedagogy, such as scaffolding assignments, can not only help to limit use of AI writing but also purchasing essays from online sources and other forms of cheating.

In this presentation, I present the example of my course Introduction to Culture and Literature, in which I replaced traditional grading and assessment with social active learning methodologies. While the real-world demands students' highly functional competences in digital, transdisciplinarity, critical thinking and UN Sustainable Development Goals literacy, our Humanities curriculums are still oriented toward regurgitating memorized information and meta-referentiality out of actual-world contexts. Thanks to Perusall, I managed to create a different learning experience in which the final goal is not to obtain a grade but to gain meta-cognitive skills critical to real-world problem-solving and professional development.

This presentation focuses on the use of Perusall in higher education as a means of promoting self-directed learning, engagement, and 21st-century skill development. In exploring non-formal pedagogy, the emphasis is on choice, flexibility, group learning, and dialog. This video session is an active and interactive experience designed to provide participants with new perspectives on the benefits of collaborative tools and to broaden their understanding of the potential gains for the learning process. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how Perusall can facilitate student engagement, enhance self-directed learning, and support the development of 21st-century skills.

The term neuroinclusive refers to deliberately designing somethings so that neurodivergent (people with ADHD, ASD and other conditions) and neurotypical people can benefit equally. In higher education, there is a recent increased interest in supporting neurodivergent learners as more people seek out diagnosis, treatment and accommodations. An understanding of neurodiversity, neurodivergence and the pedagogical implications of neuroinclusiveness is needed to create optimal virtual classrooms and learning experiences for all learners. Perusall offers a unique platform and a number of desirable features to design such a space.

Adequately preparing students for hands-on laboratory work is a challenge. To increase preparation, we have employed assignments to annotate the protocol on Perusall. This helps identify technical language that is obvious to the instructor, but confusing to the students. They can also annotate a generic procedure with specifics to their experiment. Importantly, students answer questions about why particular steps are used. Finally, they may feel more comfortable asking questions in a written format and have more time to process complex information. Taken altogether, we suggest this may be an effective tool in the laboratory, as well as the classroom.

Faculty teaching classes with an emphasis on writing have responded to ChatGPT’s emergence in education with valid ethical questions and concern regarding the devaluation of writing. Two writing instructors, one of whom is also an instructional designer, explore these responses as well as the importance of helping students to define genre and purpose and use them to determine whether AI can be appropriately applied. Ultimately, the increasing accessibility of AI chatbots compels instructors and instructional designers to hold themselves to a higher standard, crafting specific and relevant writing prompts that motivate students to craft original writing.

Questions are a key way of clarifying not only course material, but also course policies and assignment prompts. However, not all students may feel equally comfortable asking questions, especially at the start of a course. I used Perusall syllabus and assignment annotation in an intermediate level biology course to ensure that all students were invited into conversation about my course and assignment design, and have their questions answered. Annotating the syllabus was an effective in-class practice exercise for future social annotation assignments, and assignment annotations were useful formative check-ins for students to monitor their progress towards their goals.

Peer Instruction (PI) was introduced by Mazur to help students learn physics concepts during lectures. Besides physics, PI has also been adopted in other STEM fields. In this approach, students answer a related question individually after a concept has been presented. Before they revote on the same question individually, they are asked to convince others their answer is correct during peer discussion. The percentage of correct answer typically increased after peer discussion. However, Smith et al. highlighted that the improvement may be due to copying, not because students actually learned how to reason correctly. To exclude copying, Smith et al. modified Mazur’s PI protocol by adding a second question Q2 after the students revote on the first question Q1. Q2 is ‘isomorphic’ to Q1, meaning that it requires the application of the same concept but the ‘cover story’ is different. Here, we simplify Smith et al.’s PI protocol by removing the revote on Q1. Moreover, our Q1 and Q2 are similar, i.e. the same but some information given is different. Our PI protocol is thus the same as Mazur’s, except the pre and post discussion questions are not exactly the same. We replace PI in our protocol by teacher’s instruction (TI) to compare the effectiveness of PI with TI for a pair of similar questions involving Lenz’s law, using Hake’s normalized gain and a statistical test. Our results show that TI is more effective than PI, in our protocol, for the highly challenging pair of similar questions involving Lenz’s law.

Over the past 30 years an abundance of research has demonstrated the benefits of Peer Instruction. The transition to remote teaching during the pandemic necessitated a re-evaluation of synchronous and asynchronous instructional activities. While Peer Instruction is readily adapted to a synchronous remote environment and beneficial to helping engage students at a distance, we began exploring making Peer Instruction more asynchronous. As we will show, our new approach to Peer Instruction offers many benefits, including an immediate reinforcement of asynchronous information transfer as well as more efficient and richer social learning for students. Most importantly, it permits using synchronous time with students — regardless of whether this time is spent remotely or in person — on activities that further scaffold understanding.

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Situated within the context of teacher education, this paper examines how a group of 30 pre- and in-service teachers (T) of English on a Master of Education Language Awareness (LA) course at the University in Hong Kong are empowered as ‘TLA experts’ on Perusall, take part in a series of synergized asynchronous and synchronous activities via Perusall designed by their instructor and experience significant TLA gains. Adopting the Community of Inquiry (COI) framework developed by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2000), the paper analyzes teacher learning in the three interrelated domains of social presence, instructor presence and cognitive presence. Guided by the social constructivist approach to teaching and learning and building on the ‘Perusall Managers’ model introduced by Tavares (2021), the teachers on the LA course are assigned by their instructor to be ‘TLA experts’ of designated areas. With a clearly defined focus and from different angles, these ‘experts’ initiate and facilitate exchanges on Perusall as they take charge of the analysis of texts in the form of authentic textbook and classroom-discourse excerpts. Acknowledging one another’s visible social presence on the platform by their leadership and management of discussions, the ‘experts’ report enjoying their collaborative inquiry and working closely as a COI to “complete a puzzle to form a whole picture together” which challenges them to think from multiple perspectives and deepens their theoretical understanding. The paper discusses how the instructor makes use of the functionalities on Perusall to amplify instructor presence, boost the experts’ confidence, and promote timely and ongoing professional dialogues, thereby tightening their bonding as a COI in their journey of knowledge co-construction. It highlights how social presence and instructor presence impact positively on the experts’ motivation to interact and engage with the course content and texts, which in turn strengthens their cognitive presence. Specifically, emphasis is placed on how the instructor pedagogically organizes the interactive learning environment, tasks and activities in the synchronous virtual LA classroom amid the COVID-19 pandemic to further sharpen the experts’ critical thinking skills, and foster a climate conducive to their re-evaluation and re-interpretation of their analyses of more complex topics via Perusall. The design of the end-of-the-LA-course assessment to reinforce their TLA is also explored. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications for the teachers-as-TLA-experts initiative and makes recommendations on ways of maximizing the affordances of Perusall in teacher learning and empowerment.