Perusall Exchange®

Jonathan Morgan, United States Military Academy, Behavioral Sciences and Leadership, West Point, NY United States, I assigned 10 "extra credit" readings via Perusall - the assignment was for students to read an article, comment, and submit a one page reflection paper in the course LMS. After 5 iterations, I change the guidance, removing the reflection paper and instructing students to engage with the article using Perusall to comment, question, and share key learnings. I saw a >20% increase in student engagement and experienced livelier class discussion. Is Perusall to thank?

Magda Lillalí Rendón García, UNAM, FCPyS, Ciudad de México, México, Perusall makes group work easier to manage. The objective is to analyze documents based on the students' depth of knowledge. The successes were: agility, interaction, integration, expansion of knowledge, collaborative work. The mistakes were: technical problems, extra time to handle the resource, the skills of the participants, the skills and previous knowledge that were very uneven.

Charity D. Davenport University of Tennessee-Knoxville, English Language Institute Knoxville, TN, United States In this presentation, participants will learn how Academic Reading Circles, created by Tyson Seburn (2016), encourages close, active reading, improves reading comprehension, and promotes collaboration via annotations. ARC is a jigsaw group activity targeted to adult ESL students in EAP (English for Academic Purposes) courses. In ARCs, students have different roles, such as finding main ideas, explaining background information, finding images and video related to the reading, key vocabulary, and making connections to other readings.

Carisma Nel, Elma Marais, North-West University, Education, Potchefstroom South Africa: Student dissatisfaction with feedback during the teaching practicum presents a “wicked” problem that requires a strategic partnership approach between the teacher educator, mentor teacher and student teacher. The purpose of this exploratory case study is to provide an overview of student teachers’ perspectives on the use of Perusall, especially with regard to the practice-based pedagogy of video analysis, to ensure greater collaboration on the “wicked” problem of feedback by all partners during the teaching practicum.

Mickey S Schafer, University of Florida, University Writing Program, Gainesville, FL United States: As a teacher of discipline-specific prose, I believe that writing as a practitioner powers the process of becoming that practitioner. But what do students think about this belief? Like “showing your work” in math, Perusall annotations reveal student stances, reactions, and postures rarely glimpsed during class discussion, a scrying tool into the developing student mind. In this presentation, we’ll examine the joy of eavesdropping and how entering this ongoing conversation impacts lesson-making.

Lara Allen, Pratt Institute, Intensive English Program, Brooklyn, NY United States: This session illustrates the identification of lexical collocations for adoption within Perusall. Through collaborative analysis, we focus on recognizing language patterns and identifying potential pitfalls when reading a text from a specialized field. By dissecting an art related text through social annotation, the hope is for students to not only recognize common groups of words, but also to cultivate discernment when employing new language patterns.

Katherine Jewell In Hip Hop History and Culture, Fitchburg State University, History, Fitchburg, MA, United States: I had to pivot my class to online because of Covid-19. In moving video and song discussions to Perusall, I discovered new ways to engage students with primary source analysis and multimedia engagement that exceed discussions in a traditional classroom setting.

John Peacock Maryland Institute College of Art, Humanistic Studies Baltimore, MD, United States I asked this question of international students from cultures where one doesn’t ask elders a lot of questions or compete with peers. The students, who had used Perusall to annotate the chapter “Panopticism” in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, concluded that while Perusall is ethnocentrically panoptic, they enjoyed it as a peer-centered break from the filiopietistic ways in which they had traditionally been educated before coming to the United States.

Helaine W. Marshall Long Island University-Hudson, Teacher Education White Plains, NY, United States The Synchronous Online Flipped Learning Approach, or SOFLA®, (Marshall & Kostka, 2020) combines flipped learning with online learning in an eight-step learning cycle with structured, interactive, multimodal activities, both asynchronous and synchronous. Integral to SOFLA® is peer feedback, and students are trained in the SHAC Technique – Share, Help, Ask, and Comment (Fethi & Marshall, 2018). Perusall is an ideal tool for using SHAC to encourage peer feedback, engage students in social annotation, and increase interaction.

Robert, W, Wilson, The Juilliard School, Liberal Arts, New York, NY United States: In this presentation, I describe how to use Perusall to collaboratively peer review essays, and the benefits of this approach. After comparing a traditional method of peer review, with that enabled by Perusall, I argue that Perusall is superior because it facilitates the process and leads to collective learning. This is because Perusall permits public conversations, allowing participants to discuss ideas in depth, as opposed to making singular, and perhaps, repetitive, contributions.

Christopher L. Schedler Central Washington University, English Ellensburg, WA, United States For a new online “Introduction to Literature” course developed with an open education textbook, I designed two types of assignments to foster student-to-student and student-to-content interaction: 1) online discussions in Canvas, and 2) online annotations in Perusall. Based on learning analytics and student surveys, I compare online student engagement with peers and digital texts in these two types of assignments. Participants will discuss best practices for creating and facilitating online assignments that foster student engagement.

Justin C. Medina Lycoming College, Criminal Justice-Criminology Williamsport, PA, United States Student buy-in and engagement are perennial classroom issues. Perusall reading assignments help address these obstacles by providing an asynchronous backchannel of communication between students, peers, and the instructor. Students who rarely engage in class discussions can actively participate in low-stakes writing that enhances the learning process. Implementing this assignment to assess critical thinking and managing the volume of student annotations is challenging.

Irene Hernández Ruiz Universidad Nacional, Informatics Heredia, Costa Rica "One of the most useful elements of Perusall is its algorithm that analyzes the students comments and produces a report on those areas of the reading material that have given the students the most problems. The Confusion Report provides the instructor with the information needed to prepare the class session to focus on content students have engaged with. The subject chosen to implement Perusall is Fundamentals of Computer Science, a first year course in the Information Systems Engineering program at the School of Computer Science of the Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica. The course is taught in Spanish and has 25 students enrolled."

Tomiko, B., Yoneda , University of Victoria, Psychology, Victoria Canada: While there is extensive and nuanced diversity across Indigenous Peoples, there are some overarching commonalities across Indigenous approaches to learning and teaching. This presentation will focus on the extent to which weekly Perusall annotations contribute to Indigenous Ways of Knowing, Being and Doing by promoting critical thinking and shared analysis, interconnection and reflection, and bidirectional relationships. In this presentation, I will further elucidate these Indigenous Principles of Learning and Teaching with accompanying Perusall examples.

Lauren M. W. Barbeau University of Georgia, Center for Teaching and Learning Athens, GA, United States "Critical thinking across disciplines depends on an ability to comprehend and respond to course readings, but students often lack reading strategies needed to make sense of material and avoid reading altogether. Educators forget that reading is a skill to be mastered within a discipline. This session introduces participants to the meta-reading skills they employ as expert readers in their disciplines with a focus on using Perusall to help students move from novice to expert readers. "

Mahalingam P. R. Muthoot Institute of Technology and Science, Computer Science and Engineering Ernakulam, India When learning goes online, learner engagement becomes a top priority. Perusall’s annotation tools promote learner engagement through gamification in the classroom. In order to implement gamification, three major metrics can be used - auto grading score, active reading time percentage, and upvotes. The end result will be a consolidated set of points that have been decided based on the time spent on learning the content, quality of annotations, and helpfulness of annotations. In principle, this is a good measure of how well the content has been consumed by each student. This concept was tested in one course during Fall 2020, and was found to correlate well with ground truth.

Steve Yalisove, University of Michigan, Materials Science and Engineering, Ann Arbor, Michigan United States: Sadly, textbooks tend to become really thick as they approach the 5th or higher editions. They become more like encyclopedias instead of easy to read books. Yet, either your department demands you use it or it is simply the best book. How can you assign 80 pages of dense technical text for thoughtful reading before every class? Your students will revolt. This talk will offer a way to solve this problem by creating reading problems with links to the parts of the text or recorded lecture in Perusall, that can be used as reference. This taps into our student's well honed hunter-gatherer skills. Keeping everything in Perusall allows your class to interact and reap the benefits of Perusall's team-based social platform.

Dagmar Scharold, Manuel Fernandez University of Houston-Downtown, English (Scharold), Technology Learning Services (Fernandez) Houston, TX, United States We will focus on using Perusall to create a synchronous annotation jam where students and the instructor read and annotate the text together. In an annotation jam, the instructor becomes part of the class, introducing relevant Perusall functionalities and modeling annotation practices. Students can see all annotations in real time, thereby making reading as visible to students as writing.

Erwin A. van Vliet, Natasa Brouwer, Sjoukje Kerman, Francien Giebels, University of Amsterdam, Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences, Center for Neuroscience, Amsterdam The Netherlands: What started,at the University of Amsterdam in September 2019, as a pilot in which Perusall was used in one course with 60 users,evolved into a professional organization to support more than 400 courses with over 8000 users within the whole university, including a Perusall helpdesk and a website for support. We would like to share our key steps in this process.

Phoebe Jackson SALTISE (www.saltise.ca) & John Abbott College, Physics Montreal, Canada This session showcases a scaffolding tool that helps address three challenges teachers face when using Perusall: low annotation quality, the tendency to use Perusall for Q&A rather than a critical exploration of the text; and a decrease in engagement over time. This session encourages a discussion of best practices for scaffolding students’ use of Perusall and offers a free tool that attendees can download and use as is, or modify to their needs (www.saltise.ca).