Perusall Exchange®

There is a great need for cross-boundary interaction in education. The cross-boundary learning is becoming a universal social learning model. However, cross-boundary learning activities do not happen automatically and need to be triggered, maintained and promoted by specific mechanisms. Based on theoretical and practical exploration of a case carried out by the author involving calligraphers, painters, musician, linguists, government officials and students from different disciplines and different countries, this paper illustrates the “NO WAR” strategy in cross-boundary learning. N: Network O: Organize W: Work A: Attract R: Reflect With the rapid development of new technologies, the rules and problems of cross-boundary learning under the Internet environment are further explored in this case establishing clear themes, providing organized, meaningful, responsible and attractive communication scenarios, promoting participants in different activity systems to cross the boundaries of their fields and interact with participants in other activity systems, then to form a new collective concept.

Eric Mazur initially developed Peer Instruction as a social learning method for face-to-face classrooms. The bulk of applied scholarship on Peer Instruction spanning three decades addresses recommendations and guidelines for in-person implementation. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic, demand for evidence-based pedagogies that facilitate learning in online and virtual environments skyrocketed. In this session, the authors draw on recent scholarship to explore options for deploying Peer Instruction in synchronous online, hybrid, and asynchronous modalities in ways that align with the science of learning.

One way to teach difficult content is to use games and stories. People more often remember a story someone tells them (social interaction). But to understand the game or story, students need to have background in the field. Cybersecurity is a field on the cutting edge and constantly changing. Traditional textbooks do not match the most current content, and the newest topics. In Perusall it is possible to bring together the seminal works on cybersecurity and usable design and the latest research. The commentary the students add relates older content to the real-world events they predict. These comments become the building blocks for a game which in turn reinforces the content. The students tell each other stories to teach each other.

During a live roundtable discussion, moderated by Eric Mazur, co-founder of Perusall, five students share their experiences using Perusall in their courses. The students range from outgoing freshman to post-graduate and represent a range of experience using the social e-learning platform.

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.